Abstract:

Modern information access technologies have broadened both access to information and the ability to disseminate new information. In this talk, he takes up the question of why we develop and deploy information access technologies. As information and information access have profound impact on both individual people and the societies they shape and inhabit, clearly defining the goals of such systems is necessary to properly evaluate them and to ensure that information access promotes healthy, well-informed, and democratic societies. Michael Ekstrand will discuss several goals that may be set for an information access system; how those may support or oppose broader economic, political, ethical, or social objectives and principles; and how specific goals affect the evaluation of the effectiveness, behavior, and impacts of information access systems.

Biography:

Michael Ekstrand is an assistant professor of information science at Drexel University, where he leads the Impact, Novation, Effectiveness, and Responsibility of Technology for Information Access Lab (INERTIAL). His research blends human-computer interaction, information retrieval, machine learning, and statistics 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.