Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Dr. Alona Zharova

© Joachim Herz Stiftung, Nelly Tekhaus

Telephone: +49 30 2093-99544

Email: alona.zharova[at]hu-berlin.de

Office hours: by appointment

Room: SPA1, 336

CV: Download

 

 

Alona is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She earned her Ph.D. in Statistics and Econometrics from the School of Business and Economics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and holds a Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in Management of Organizations and Mathematical Modelling from Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). Alona is an expert scientist at the German Climate Consortium (Deutsches Klima Konsortium) and an Add-On Fellow of the Joachim Herz Stiftung in Interdisciplinary Economics and Interdisciplinary Business Administration. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Australian National University and the National University Singapore, among others. Alona has extensive experience in research coordination, having managed a Collaborative Research Center (CRC) and an International Research Training Group at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), for several years. 

Her research focuses on AI-driven forecasting and optimization, design and development of recommendation systems, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and complex data visualization. She applies these methodologies to data-driven decision support, demand-side climate change mitigation, electricity load management in households, and smart home and smart city solutions.

Currently, Alona is leading a transfer project on Electricity Load Management for Demand-Side Climate Change Mitigation, for which she has been awarded a Transfer Fellowship (2025) from the Joachim Herz Stiftung. The project's web-based platform is built on the initial-stage results (link to webpage), with further developments underway. It provides daily recommendations to German households on shifting electricity consumption to reduce CO₂ emissions.

 

Research areas

Methods

  • Recommendation systems
  • Multi-agent systems
  • Explainable AI
  • Reinforcement learning

Data-Centric AI

  • Active learning
  • Data quality evaluation
  • Cross-domain data quality metrics

Decision-making Support

  • Complex data visualization techniques

  • Collaboration networks

  • Research performance evaluation

  • Managerial and policy-making decision support

Climate Change Mitigation 

  • Load Management

  • Smart Home and Smart City
  • Digital twins
  • Energy-efficiency in buildings

  • Demand-side mitigation

 

International ‌Research Stays

  • University of Oxford (UK) - scheduled April & June 2025
  • Australian National University (Australia) - February-March 2025
  • National University Singapore (Singapore) - January 2025
  • Universidad de La Habana (Cuba) - 2023
  • Australian National University (Australia) - 2023
  • National University Singapore (Singapore) - 2018

 

Third-party funding and Grants

  • Individual Strategic Partnership Grant for two research stays at the University of Oxford, UK, "Demand-side climate change mitigation: Potential of residential energy storage", by the DFG through the Strategic Partnerships Program of the Excellence (5000 €), 2025
  • Grant "Open Humboldt Freiräume" for funding a 6-month research sabbatical, "Demand-Side Climate Change Mitigation: Citizen-Centered Solutions for Climate-Friendly Energy Consumption Behavior"(~35000 €), funded by the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) within the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments, 2025
  • Transfer project “Platform for Promoting Energy Efficiency and CO₂ Reduction in Private Households” funded by the Joachim Herz Stiftung (80000€), 2025
  • Individual Global Partnership Grant for co-funding of a research stay at the Australian National University (ANU), "Recommendation Systems for nudging households in Germany and Australia towards energy-efficient behavior to reduce CO₂ emissions", by the DFG through the Strategic Partnerships Program of the Excellence (2500 €), 2025
  • Add-on Fellowship of the Joachim Herz Stiftung in Interdisciplinary Economics and Interdisciplinary Business Administration , “Field Study: Nudging Energy-Efficient Behavior in Private Households Through the Application of Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation Systems”, (15500 €), 2023 – 2025
  • Participating Researcher at the Scientific Network Programme “Management AI”, funded by the DFG (36900 € in total), 2024 - 2026
  • Individual International Connections Grant for a research stay at the Australian National University (ANU), "Nudging Energy-Efficient Behavior in Private Households through the Recommendation Systems", funded by the DFG through the Strategic Partnerships Program of the Excellence (6000 €), 2023
  • Individual Grant for a research stay at the Universidad de La Habana, Kuba (UH), "Sustainable Economic Development and Recommendations Systems supporting Energy-Efficiency in Private Households", funded by the DAAD through the Berlin Center for Global Engagement (BCGE) (4400 €), 2023
  • Co-PI at the project “AI for Energy Finance”, funded by the European Union through the Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (ca. 1.4 Mio. € in total), 2023 - 2026
  • Co-PI at the project “AI Marketer”, funded by the Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB), Program for promoting Research, Innovations and Technologies (ProFIT), (296530 € in total), 2021 - 2023
  • Co-PI at the HU Berlin - National University Singapore (NUS) Joint Research Project in “Augmented Intelligence in Digital Society”, funded by the National University Singapore (NUS) (16500 € in total), 2018 - 2020
  • Individual grant of Erasmus Mundus BMU-MID for 6 months exchange mobility at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (9000 €), 2013 - 2014

 

Teaching

B.Sc.

  • Strategie, Organisation und Information Technology (Lecture & Exercise, ca. 400 students); SoSe23
  • Introduction to Programming in Java (Lecture & Exercise, ca. 200 students); SoSe24, SoSe23, SoSe21, SoSe20, SoSe18 (Exercises available in YouTube, Link)
  • Seminar Wirtschaftsinformatik (24 students); WiSe24-25, SoSe20, SoSe18
  • Statistics II (Exercise, 20 students); WiSe16-17
  • Management Simulation (Simulation Game, 35 students), International Summer School in Economics and Management (ISSEM) of the HU Berlin in Havana, Cuba; SoSe19, SoSe17, SoSe16, SoSe15

M.Sc.

  • Seminar Information Systems, Implementation project (24 students); WiSe24-25, WiSe23-24, WiSe22-23, WiSe20-21
  • Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (Lecture), International Summer School in Economics and Management (ISSEM) of the HU Berlin in Havana, Cuba; SoSe23
  • Business Analytics and Data Science (Exercise, ca. 150 students/ 90 exams); WiSe20-21
  • Seminar IT Security and Privacy (40 students); SoSe23
  • Seminar Applied Predictive Analytics (24 students); SoSe24, SoSe21

Ph.D.

  • Research Seminar Information Systems (Ph.D. & selected MSc theses); WiSe23-24, WiSe22-23, SoSe21, WiSe20-21, SoSe20

 

Service

Refereeing activities

  • Tagung WI (Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik), 2025, 2024, Associate Editor and Reviewer
  • BISE (Business & Information Systems Engineering) journal, Reviewer
  • ECIS (European Conference on Information Systems), 2024, Reviewer
  • Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop within NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), 2024 & 2023, Reviewer & Meta-Reviewer
  • Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop within ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations), 2025, 2024, 2023, Reviewer
  • International Journal of Forecasting, Reviewer

Further Engagements

  • Expert advisor of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) Management office, support with Data Analyses for the application for BUA prolongation to the DFG, 2024 - 2025
  • Member of the ProFiL-Program (Professionalisierung für Frauen in Forschung und Lehre: Mentoring – Training – Networking), since 2023
  • Expert of the Deutsche Klima-Konsortium e.V. (DKK), since 2020
  • Expert advisor of the Vice President for Research and Research Service Centre of the HU Berlin, 2016 - 2019
  • Volunteer support for Ukrainian refuge researchers in Berlin, since 2022
  • Advisor to several StartUps, since 2021

 

Selected conferences

  • ICLR 2023 Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop: Activity-Based Recommendations for the Reduction of CO2 Emissions in Private Households (with Löschmann L) https://iclr.cc/virtual/2023/13480
  • NeurIPS 2022 Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop: Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes (with Boer A, Knoblauch J, Schewina KI, Vihs J) https://neurips.cc/virtual/2022/59278
  • NUS Workshop on Research Metrics (2019), National University Singapore, Singapore (SG), Is Scientific Performance a Function of Funds?
  • Singapore Economic Review Conference 2019 (SERC), Singapore (SG): Emergence of Trends in Economics
  • International Conference on Econometrics and Statistics (EcoSta 2017), Hong Kong (CN): A multivariate dynamic analysis of third-party funds

 

Selected publications

Papers in peer-reviewed journals

  • Riabchuk V, Hagel L, Germaine F  and Zharova* A (2024) Utility-Based Context-Aware Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy Efficiency in Residential Buildings. Information Fusion, 112, 102559. Code in GitHub. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2024.102559
  • Zharova* A, Boer A, Knoblauch J, Schewina KI and Vihs J (2024). Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes. Environmental Data Science, 2024, 3:e7. Code in GitHub. https://doi.org/10.1017/eds.2024.8
  • Zharova* A, Härdle WK, and Lessmann S (2023) Data-driven support for policy and decision-making in university research management: A case study from Germany. European Journal of Operational Research, 308(1), 353-368. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2022.10.016 Quantlets in GitHub
  • Zharova* A, Tellinger-Rice J and Härdle WK (2018) How to measure the performance of a Collaborative Research Center. Scientometrics, 117(2), 1023–1040. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2910-8 Quantlets in GitHub

Book chapters

  • Aisbett E, Steinhauser R, and Zharova A (2024) International Green Economy Collaboration Networks: Pathway or Peril for SDG 13? In Beirne J, Ma S, Rahut DB & Suryadarma D (Eds.), Striving to Meet the Sustainable Development Goals: Next Steps for Policymakers and Practitioners , (pp. 273-286). ADBI Press. https://doi.org/10.56506/ACFH4829

Papers in peer-reviewed conferences / Proceedings

  • Zharova* A, Löschmann L, and Lessmann, S (2024) Optimizing Household Energy Use: An Activity-based Recommendation System for Reducing CO2 Emissions. Wirtschaftsinformatik 2024 Proceedings. 87. https://aisel.aisnet.org/wi2024/87
  • Aisbett E, Steinhauser R, and Zharova A (2023) International Green Economy Collaboration Networks: Pathway or Peril for SDG 13? Asian Development Bank Institute’s 2023 Annual Conference “Sustainable Development Goals: Midway Assessment and the Road Ahead”.

Working Papers / Preprints

  • Zharova* A and Lee HE (2022) Understanding User Perception and Intention to Use Smart Home for Energy Efficiency: A Survey. arXiv Preprint. Code in GitHub. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.05019
  • Zharova A and Scherz A (2022) Multistep Multiappliance Load Prediction. arXiv Preprint.   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.09426
  • Zharova* A, Mihoci A and Härdle WK (2016). Academic ranking scales in economics: prediction and imputation, SFB 649 Discussion paper, (020)2016. Quantlets in GitHub

* - corresponding author