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bmitra.bsky.social
Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র
@bmitra.bsky.social
1.2K followers 570 following 260 posts
Information Retrieval Researcher ✊🏽🍉🕊️ | Pronouns: He/him

Homepage: https://bhaskar-mitra.github.io/
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bmitra.bsky.social
"I am the sea
In my depths all treasures dwell."
January 31, 2026 at 4:42 AM
bmitra.bsky.social
Such a heart-wrenchingly beautiful movie.
January 31, 2026 at 4:42 AM
bmitra.bsky.social
My "breakup letter" to Big Tech from last summer has been published in the inaugural issue of the Disjunctions magazine. We don't need to remain complicit in genocides, ecological devastations, worker disempowerment, and in building the infrastructure for fascism. We can and must do better.
Cover image with the title "Why I'm Leaving Big Tech: A tech worker's reflections" by Bhaskar Mitra. Blurb from the article: But the grand fictitious narratives about AI, both the hype and the fearmongering, will continue to bolster claims of their “foundational” advancements, creating the conditions to commodify labor, renegotiate down worker compensation, and provide political cover for further dismantling of our social services. This will result in the largest ever accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of a diminishing few, while the legitimate needs of the people, from healthcare to education, are met with “let them eat chatbots”. That is the intent and why AI is a project of class domination. Blurb from the article: This is not to say that technologies like language models cannot be useful. As a researcher, I am genuinely excited by their potential to enable more accessible forms of knowledge production. Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.
January 20, 2026 at 4:42 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Watched the deeply moving "Sudan, Remember Us" at La Sala Rossa last evening. Thanks Sudan Solidarity Collective for screening the documentary. #AllEyesOnSudan
Shot from the documentary film "Sudan, Remember Us" showing a road block sign that reads "Sorry for the delay, uprooting a regime".
December 27, 2025 at 3:35 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
The #1 movie the year you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go:

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Yep, sounds about right for 2026. You tell'em, Dr. Malcolm.
December 20, 2025 at 1:09 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Slides from my keynote address at FIRE'26 conference titled "Emancipatory Information Retrieval: Radically Reorienting Information Retrieval Research to Resist Corporate and Authoritarian Capture of our Information Ecosystems". #FIRE2026

bhaskar-mitra.github.io/files/emanci...
December 18, 2025 at 5:23 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Excited to share that my paper on Emancipatory IR has been published by @irrj.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy. I wrote this as a provocation for the IR community to recognize information access as profoundly political and situate our work in resistance to oppression and injustice.
irrj.org/article/view...
Illustrating the practices, projects, and provocations of emancipatory IR. The hexagons at the center represent several potential projects. The empty hexagons indicate that the set of mentioned projects are not complete, and the community should over time identify new ones and shape existing ones, as appropriate. Sur-rounding the projects is the framework of practices of emancipatory IR that are relevant to all projects in this area, consisting of (i) diagnose and critique, (ii)imagine viable alternative futures, and (iii) elaborate theories of change. Provo-cations to spark new ideas and research directions are depicted as a nudging hand.
December 15, 2025 at 3:12 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Congratulations to all recipients of the best paper award, best paper runner up award, and outstanding reviewers awards presented at the SIGIR-AP 2025 banquet last night. #SIGIRAP2025

cc: @acmsigir-ap.bsky.social
December 9, 2025 at 11:59 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
After months of hard work from so many people, super excited to welcome everyone to SIGIR-AP 2025 at the conference opening today. #SIGIRAP2025
December 8, 2025 at 12:03 AM
bmitra.bsky.social
Montreal, you are beautiful! ❤️
Photo from my balcony looking over Montreal downtown under a light blanket of snow at sunset.
November 12, 2025 at 2:34 AM
bmitra.bsky.social
*chef's kiss*
Screenshot of ClearSky showing the top 5 blocked accounts on Bluesky in the last 24 hours are whitehouse-47.bsky.social, homelandgov.bsky.social, deptofwar.bsky.social, hhsofficial.bsky.social, and state-department.bsky.social. Screenshot of ClearSky showing the whitehouse-47.bsky.social is #4 all-time top blocked accounts on Bluesky.
October 18, 2025 at 4:01 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
In our lifetime Palestine will be free. ✊🏽 🇵🇸 🍉 🕊️
October 4, 2025 at 9:19 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Look who just joined Bluesky! 👀

It's @acmsigir.bsky.social. 😇
Screenshot of ACM SIGIR profile on Bluesky displaying their logo, banner image, description, and website information.
September 26, 2025 at 3:20 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Wrapping up an exciting Dagstuhl Seminar on "RAG – The Future of Search?". I gave a talk about the threat of AI persuasion to censor and manipulate public opinion. We must be intentional to ensure these technologies liberate us, not manipulate us.

Slides: www.slideshare.net/slideshow/so...
A group photo of all the seminar attendees standing together on the Baroque hall chapel stairs at Schloss Dagstuhl.
September 26, 2025 at 2:58 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
📣 Announcing the call for papers for The Web Conference 2026 Responsible Web Track.

Abstracts due: September 30, 2025
Full papers due: October 7, 2025

🔗 Full call for papers: www2026.thewebconf.org/calls/resear...

#WebConf2026 #ResponsibleWeb
**Responsible Web** We invite research contributions to the Responsible Web track. Over the past decades, the Web and the internet have grown to be an integral part of our lives. Through this track, we aim to surface the latest research on what it means to build a responsible web and internet, one that contributes towards realising more equitable, emancipatory, and sustainable futures. The relevant topics include, but are not limited to: * Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web * Audits of web technologies, standards, platforms, and applications * Consent frameworks and practices on the web * Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web * Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices * Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web technologies * Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web * Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy * Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship * Mitigating misinformation and disinformation * Mitigating online harms, including harassment, spam, and fake reviews * Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications * Sustainability and climate impact of web technologies * Technology governance, policy, and regulations * Web for democratic and emancipatory futures
September 16, 2025 at 12:38 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
It's deadline day! 🏃🏾‍♂️‍➡️🏃🏾‍➡️🏃🏾‍♀️‍➡️ #TREC2025 #TRECToT #TREC2025ToT
September 10, 2025 at 2:56 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
The pushback against AI should be contextualized as a strategic boycott opposing Big Tech & Silicon Valley's push to disempower the working class and their complicity in global rise in authoritarianism. If AI is the digital picket line, how do we practice care and empathy in building this movement?
September 8, 2025 at 11:46 AM
bmitra.bsky.social
📆 Join us Tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26 at 2p ET!

Registration is free but required to join the debate live: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

cc: @womeninaiethics.bsky.social
Poster for WAIE+ "Join the Debate" with Mia Shah-Dand, Hessie Jones, Beatriz González Mellídez, and Bhaskar Mitra.
August 25, 2025 at 10:06 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Maria and I are looking forward to your submissions to the track. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions.

CFP: ecir2026.eu/calls/call-f...

end/
**IR-for-Good Track Dates** Abstract submission: October 21, 2025, 11:59pm (AoE) Paper submission: October 28, 2025, 11:59pm (AoE) Paper notification: December 16, 2025 **IR-for-Good Track Chairs:** Bhaskar Mitra – Independent Researcher, Canada Maria Heuss – University of Amsterdam **Contact:** ecir2026-ir4good@easychair.org
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
This year, we do not set separate submission tracks for #IR4Good full and short papers. All submissions must be between 6 to 12 pages in length plus additional pages for references. Paper lengths should be commensurate with its contribution.
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Submissions of papers must be at least 6 pages (the sixth page should have at least some content but not necessary to fill it) and at most 12 pages in length plus additional pages for references. The "Theory of Change" section and Appendices count toward the page limit. Please put appendices before the references for paper submission. While this year we do not set separate submission tracks for full and short papers in the IR-for-Good track, the assessment of each submission will be based on whether the paper length is commensurate with its contribution. For example, a 6-page paper would be accepted if its scientific contribution is worth 6 pages. However, a 12-page paper would be considered weak if it only contains the substance of a 6-page paper.
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
The CFP includes several example cases to illustrate the kind of critical reflections we want to encourage authors and reviewers to engage in when claiming societal impact.
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Claim: Our work that proposes a method for making expensive machine learning models for IR more efficient contributes towards sustainability and reducing impact on the environment. Considerations for this claim: What preconditions are necessary for the efficiency improvements to translate to reduced impact on the environment? E.g., according to the Jevons paradox in economics, when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application) it often results in overall increase in demand, causing total resource consumption to rise instead of falling. Is it more likely then that more efficient models may in fact lead to a false sense of mitigation and result in much wider adoption contributing to increased harm to the environment? Claim: Our work that improves alignment of LLMs towards specific social values contributes towards user safety by preventing exposure to harmful content. Considerations for this claim: Who gets to decide what is harmful or select the values the system should be aligned with? Could these approaches in fact further centralize power and control over what is deemed "acceptable" vs. "harmful" speech? Could this stifle the voices of marginalized people and social activists? Could this incentivize authoritarian capture of information access platforms to manipulate public opinion? Does the proposed approach consider both the social and technical aspects of this problem to ensure democratic oversight and emancipatory outcomes? Claim: Our work that proposes new methods for generating explanations for model outputs contributes towards increasing user trust in the system. Considerations for this claim: Is that trust beneficial or harmful for the user? Is that trust warranted or could it in fact draw users into a false sense of safety and distract them from noticing how the system surveils them and subtly manipulates their behavior? How can this explainability intervention actually help reveal and challenge existing power structures? Claim: Our work that proposes a new ranking approach for gender fairness contributes towards gender justice. Considerations for this claim: How does the adopted definition of "gender fairness" in this work translate to mitigating real-world "gender discrimination"? Does this work assume that gender is binary, erasing other identities? Does this work assume that gender is known for all users / subjects and incentivize further intensification of surveillance and collection of private demographic data from members of historically marginalized communities? How can this work be operationalized in practice towards gender and sexuality justice? Are there example use-cases where this can be reliably demonstrated (e.g., ranking in hiring or job recommendation applications)?
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Authors should critically engage with these questions, not just as an afterthought. Do not inflate your claims of societal impact, instead rigorously deliberate on your sociotechnical assumptions and potential negative externalities.
6/
We encourage authors and reviewers to critically engage with this section while acknowledging the real uncertainty of how any well-intentioned research may impact society in practice. Our goal is not to encourage authors to inflate their claims of social impact but to rigorously deliberate on their sociotechnical assumptions and enumerate the necessary preconditions for the work to have its desired impact and also potential negative externalities. We recommend that the "Theory of Change" section should explicitly state: 1. What is the identified societal need / problem, and how are the core contributions from this current work expected to address them? 2. What preconditions are necessary or what assumptions need to hold for this work to have its desired effect, and how likely are they to hold true in practice? 3. What are possible negative externalities of this approach and is it plausible that this may lead to new or different harms? Authors are encouraged to include any additional discussions that they may deem relevant in this section.
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
To ensure desired societal impact, this year we require all submissions that propose new tools, methods, datasets, and interventions to explicitly and rigorously argue how the work contributes towards positive social outcomes. Position papers and critiques are exempted.
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**Theories of Change** IR research that tries to affect positive social change needs to be grounded in rigorous understanding of the sociotechnical challenges and the complex socio-political context in which they exist. We require every submission that proposes new IR tools, methods, datasets, and interventions to explicitly include a separate section elaborating how the work contributes towards desired social outcomes, i.e., their theory of change. This section should not be an afterthought, instead it should be a critical part of the core motivation of the work. It is not mandatory to name the section "Theory of change" and position papers and critiques are exempted from this requirement.
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
Topics of interest for the #IR4Good track include how IR research and practices can contribute towards realizing more equitable, emancipatory, and sustainable collective futures.
4/
Specific areas of interest include, but are not limited to, how IR intersects with and/or can support: * Accessibility and disability justice * Art, culture, and representation * Crisis and disaster management * Decolonization and racial justice * Emancipation, anti-oppression, and social justice * Gender and sexuality justice * Informed citizenry, democracy, and collective decision making * Law and restorative justice * Literacy and knowledge production * Privacy and dignity * Public health and community health * Social, political, and economic equity * Sustainability and environmental justice * Worker rights and labor movements All submissions must be relevant to IR. For clarity on what should be considered relevant to IR please check the Call for Full papers for ECIR 2026.
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM
bmitra.bsky.social
We invite contributions that explore new positions, critiques, tools, methods, datasets, and interventions for IR-for-Good. We also welcome IR contributions informed by interdisciplinary perspectives, e.g., information sciences, HCI, STS, law, political sciences, etc.
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**Scope** IR-for-Good includes IR research that: 1. Explicitly concerns with new research directions and system design to achieve specific societally beneficial outcomes, 2. Develops new fairness, privacy, transparency, accessibility, sustainability, and other similar societally-motivated interventions, and/or 3. Identifies and critiques the ways in which existing IR methods and systems and how we do IR research may contribute to systemic harm or impede social progress.
August 25, 2025 at 9:10 PM