Emancipatory Information Retrieval (Invited Talk at UCC)

Our world today is facing a confluence of several mutually reinforcing crises each of which intersects with concerns of social justice and emancipation. This talk will be a provocation for the role of computer-mediated information access in our emancipatory struggles. Information retrieval (IR) is a field in computing that concerns with the design of information access systems, such as search engines and recommender systems, and has traditionally been informed by other fields such as information science, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. I define emancipatory information retrieval as the study and development of information access methods that challenge various forms of human oppression and situates its activities within broader collective emancipatory praxis. The term "emancipatory" here signifies the moral concerns of universal humanization of all peoples and the elimination of oppression to create the conditions under which we can collectively flourish. In this talk, I will present an early framework of practices, projects, and design provocations for emancipatory IR, and will situate some of my own recent work within this framework. My goal is to propose a new framing that challenges the field of IR research to embrace humanistic values and commit to universal emancipation and social justice. In this process, I believe we must both imagine post-oppressive worlds, and reimagine the role of IR in that world and in the journey that leads us there.

Speaker Details

Bhaskar Mitra is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, based in Montreal, Canada. Bhaskar’s research focuses on AI-mediated information and knowledge access. His research interests span model and system development, evaluation and benchmarking, and fairness and ethics in the context of these sociotechnical systems. Before joining Microsoft Research, he worked at Bing for 15 years. Bhaskar recently co-authored a chapter on Sociotechnical Implications of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Information Access in the book Information Access in the Era of Generative AI. Among his many other accomplishments, he is the recipient of two ACM SIGIR 2024 Early Career Researcher Awards for excellence in Research and for excellence in Community Engagement. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College London under the supervision of Dr. Emine Yilmaz.