Meet Lorena Göritz

Psychologist and Information Systems Researcher

Please introduce yourself briefly and describe your current role at DFKI

My name is Lorena Göritz, and I have been working as a researcher and team leader at DFKI for three years. I have a bachelor's degree in business psychology, a master's degree in psychology, and I am currently completing my Ph.D. in information systems. In my role as a team leader, I manage and implement our research activities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and education.

In which of the 26 research departments do you work at DFKI?

I work at the DFKI research department Smart Enterprise Engineering in Osnabrück, which is headed by Prof. Dr. Oliver Thomas. In our department, we combine the perspectives of information systems and artificial intelligence to explore digital business models for smart enterprises to prepare for the future.

What are you working on at the moment, or in other words, what are your plans for saving the world?

I am currently working on the acquisition and implementation of further research projects at the interface of AI and education. I also aim to increase the visibility of our research findings at exhibitions and presentations to show how AI can benefit everyone. As part of my PhD, I primarily focus on the ethical application of AI. My goal is to demonstrate the value of AI in detecting and mitigating discrimination in organizations.

What are your strengths and what has been your greatest success or favourite experience so far?

I am particularly proud of integrating my personal values on inclusion and diversity into the vision of our research group. Together with my colleague Daniel Stattkus, I helped to develop a diversity-sensitive approach to automatically detect and mitigate implicit discrimination in organizations.

For this work, we were awarded a prize in the "AI is what we make it!" idea contest by the German Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.

What do you enjoy most about your job at DFKI? What inspires and fascinates you?

I appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of our research topics. As an information systems group, we are thematically linked to a variety of other disciplines, which makes the diversity of our topics impressive. This diversity provides me with the opportunity to contribute my personal interests and values to the vision of our research group.

If you weren't a scientist, what would you have become?

When I started my bachelor's degree in business psychology, I initially thought I would pursue a career in human resources. However, I quickly realized that I really enjoy research methods and data analysis. Consequently, I gradually chose to pursue a scientific career.