Michael Ekstrand

Where are the People?

⮴ Talks
Header slide from talk.

“Where are the People? Political, Ethical, and Humanist Foundations for Recommendation and Information Discovery”, given at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science in Den Bosch, NL on September 9, 2026.

Abstract

Recommender systems, search engines, and other modern information discovery and access technologies have broadened both access to information and the ability to disseminate new information. In this talk, I take up the question of why we develop and deploy such technologies: when we build a recommender system, what purpose(s) do we intend it to serve?. As information, entertainment, and technologies for discovering them 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 they promote healthy, well-informed, and democratic societies.

I will discuss several different and possibly-conflicting goals that may be set for an information discovery 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.

Slides

Bibliography

Papers Discussed

Michael D. Ekstrand, Aleksandra Sarcevic, Afsaneh Razi, Maria Soledad Pera, Robin Burke, and Katherine Landau Wright. 2026. Recommending With, Not For: Co-Designing Recommender Systems for Social Good. Transactions on Recommender Systems 5(1) (August 2026; online Aug 5, 2025), 3:1–24. Selected for presentation at RecSys 2026. DOI 10.1145/3759261. arXiv:2508.03792 [cs.HC]. Cited 19 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand, Anubrata Das, Robin Burke, and Fernando Diaz. 2022. Fairness in Information Access Systems. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 16(1–2) (July 2022), 1–177. DOI 10.1561/1500000079. arXiv:2105.05779 [cs.IR]. NSF PAR 10347630. Impact factor: 8. Cited 311 times. Cited 108 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand, Lex Beattie, Maria Soledad Pera, and Henriette Cramer. 2024. Not Just Algorithms: Strategically Addressing Consumer Impacts in Information Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR ’24, IR for Good track), Mar 24–28, 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 14611:314–335. DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_25. NSF PAR 10497110. Acceptance rate: 35.9%. Cited 22 times. Cited 6 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand, Maria Soledad Pera, and Katherine Landau Wright. 2023. Seeking Information with a ‘More Knowledgeable Other’. ACM Interactions 30(1) (January 2023), 70–73. DOI 10.1145/3573364. Cited 11 times. Cited 4 times.

Works Cited