Michael Ekstrand

Keynote

To Serve Whom and How?

Provocations on the Political and Ethical Foundations of Access to Information Access

Michael Ekstrand is an assistant professor of information science at Drexel University. His research blends information retrieval, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and algorithmic fairness to try to make information access systems, such as recommender systems and search engines, good for everyone they affect. In 2018, he received the NSF CAREER award to study how recommender systems respond to biases in input data and experimental protocols and predict their future response under various technical and sociological conditions, and is co-PI on the NSF-funded POPROX project to develop shared infrastructure for user-facing recommender systems research.

Previously he was faculty at Boise State University, where he co-led the People and Information Research Team, and earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Minnesota. He leads the LensKit open-source software project for enabling high-velocity reproducible research in recommender systems and co-created the Recommender Systems specialization on Coursera with Joseph A. Konstan from the University of Minnesota. He is currently working to develop and support communities studying fairness and accountability, both within information access through the FATREC and FACTS-IR workshops and the Fair Ranking track at TREC, and more broadly through the ACM FAccT community in various roles.

Abstract:

Enabling broader access to information access technologies and their resulting benefits for acquiring, updating, and disseminating knowledge is a vital project for both research and industrial development. In this talk, I take up the complex and multifaceted question of why we might pursue this goal: What is the ultimate purpose of enabling such access? What ethical principles may motivate that goal or specific efforts in its pursuit? What theory of change or political vision is assumed by such efforts? What technological, informational, political, and economic systems are users brought into as their information access is enhanced? What are these users’ roles relative to other actors in the sociotechnical milieu in which information retrieval operates?

I argue that these questions have significant implications for when and how we work to enable more universal information access, and how we define and evaluate success in that quest. My goal with this talk is to promote discussion of the questions, goals, and assumptions underlying the kinds of work presented at IR4U2 and elsewhere, and the consequences these underlying and sometimes unstated factors have for research, development, and society.

Keynote here