NTCIR-19
Keynote Speakers
Keynote 1
Date/Time: December 8, 10:00-11:00
Title: Seize the Means of Retrieval: Safeguarding Our Information Platforms from Corporate and Authoritarian Capture
Speaker: Bhaskar Mitra (Independent Researcher, Canada)
Abstract
Today, a handful of large for-profit technology corporations exercise disproportionate power and control over our global information ecosystems. This concentration of power raises serious concerns of capture of our information platforms and their weaponization for mass surveillance and manipulation of public opinion. In the backdrop of the growing threat of global authoritarianism, it is critically important that the information retrieval (IR) community seriously engages with these concerns and articulates a vision for public IR platforms the same way that our counterparts in the social media landscape have by developing decentralized platforms like the ActivityPub-based Mastodon and the ATProto-based Bluesky. What is the alternative IR infrastructure that we should reimagine and realize in practice? In this talk, I argue that the future of IR is decentralized and emancipatory; and that we must urgently rally IR and IR-adjacent disciplines to collectively work on a range of challenging research questions—critical to realizing our vision—that are simultaneously technological, social, political, and economic.
Bio
Bhaskar Mitra is an independent researcher based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal, Canada. His research focuses on the intersection of online information access, machine learning / AI, and questions of social justice and emancipation. He is currently serving as the ACM SIGIR Secretary and as an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) journal. He has received several awards for his research, including two ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards (2024) for excellence in research and in community engagement. He received his Ph.D. (2021) in Computer Science from University College London. He previously worked at Microsoft for 19 years, first at Bing and then at Microsoft Research. However, in 2025, he made the decision to leave Big Tech and the broader for-profit tech industry in objection to their harmful impact on society.
Keynote 2
Date/Time: December 10, 10:30-11:30
Title: The Hidden Labour of Information Access: Rethinking Interactive Evaluation
Speaker: Johanne R. Trippas (RMIT University, Australia)
Abstract
This talk introduces epistemic labour as a perspective for understanding the often-hidden work people undertake to make sense of information in environments. As generated and edited content proliferates online, users must do more than judge whether information is true. They must continually assess sources, interpret framing, and decide what can reasonably be trusted and acted upon under conditions of uncertainty. The talk examines how these demands reshape the relationship between people and information systems. This perspective considers environments in which information may be partially reliable, misleading, or difficult to verify. It argues that information access is shifting from reducing uncertainty to helping people manage it. This shift raises fundamental questions for interactive evaluation, particularly how we assess systems not only by the information they retrieve, but also by the labour they require users to undertake to make that information meaningful and usable.
Bio
Dr. Johanne Trippas is a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University (Australia), where they serve as Co-Lead of the RMIT Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI) and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Working at the advanced intersection of conversational systems, interactive information retrieval, and human-computer interaction, their research focuses on next-generation intelligent capabilities, ranging from spoken conversational search and cockpit digital assistants to high-stakes AI applications like identifying cardiac arrest emergency calls with Ambulance Victoria. Trippas has received several awards for their research, including two ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards and is actively engaged in the international information retrieval community.
Last Modified: 2026-10-16