You might not know it, but every time you pull out your phone to Google an answer to a question, ask your smart speaker to play a particular song, or have Netflix recommend you a movie, the results are produced in part by a branch of computing science called information retrieval.
Information retrieval (IR), a sub-field of artificial intelligence, organises large collections of documents, images and video and enables quick and accurate presentation of data on demand.
As the world becomes more and more digital, it’s a technology that’s increasingly central to our lives. However, as AI-powered information retrieval technologies continue to develop, and are increasingly given access to vast troves of sensitive data to help them make important decisions, computing science researchers are working to ensure that the systems we build are safe, reliable, unbiased and privacy-aware.
This concept of ethical IR is an enormously important one. It’s only going to be become increasingly foregrounded in years to come as we produce ever-more data through business, government, banking and research, as well as in the digital pictures, video and text we create and store online in our personal lives.
It’s one of the main topics we're discussing at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024), which is taking place this week in Glasgow and is organised by researchers from the University of Glasgow.
More than 400 researchers from around the world will be in attendance, including representatives from Google, Spotify and Amazon.
The conference will have a dedicated "IR4Good" track to present high-quality, high-impact, original research on societal issues like algorithmic bias and fairness, privacy, and transparency. It will draw in perspectives from academia and industry, with a focus on the philosophical, legal, sociological ramifications of IR for civil society which go far beyond the technical insight usually offered at specialist conferences.
ECIR 2024 has been designed this year with a focus on community building and collaborations to accelerate progress in the responsible use of IR and AI technologies.
Part of that effort will include a"‘collab-a-thon", which will encourage delegates with an to develop new ways to safeguard the privacy and rights of both information producers and consumers.
An important aim for this year’s conference is to kick-start a large community effort to start producing new codes of practice, actionable guidance and recommendation for the fair and safe use of AI technologies in information systems. as well as discussing new auditing tools and procedures to build trust into such systems.
Our aim is that discussions begun at this year’s conference will have a ripple effect, spreading out to create real change in the ways that AI and IR are deployed in the real world.
The only way to create a future where AI can work cooperatively with humans, and reliably on its own, is by ensuring that AI approaches to information access and other tasks are deployed responsibly. At the University of Glasgow, we’re pleased to be doing our part to help create that better future.
Graham McDonald is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science
Agenda is a column for outside contributors. Contact: agenda@theherald.co.uk
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