Michael D. Ekstrand, Ph.D

Dept. of Information Science
Drexel University


https://md.ekstrandom.net

Education

Ph.D (2014)
Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN.
B.S. (2007)
Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA.

Appointments

2023–present
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Information Science, Drexel University
2022–2023
Associate Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Boise State University
2016–2022
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Boise State University
2014–2016
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Texas State University

Research

External Funding

2023–2025
NSF CCRI: live news recommendation infrastructure ($1.4M, $150K mine).
2018–2025
NSF CAREER: simulation to quantify bias in recommender systems ($514K).

Selected Publications

RecSys24
2024

A. Ferraro, M. D. Ekstrand, and C. Bauer. 2024. It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Impact of Choice Models and Ranking Strategies on Gender Imbalance in Music Recommendation. Proc. RecSys ’24. DOI 10.1145/3640457.3688163. arXiv:2409.03781 [cs.IR].

TORS24-v
2024

M. D. Ekstrand, B. Carterette, and F. Diaz. 2024. Distributionally-Informed Recommender System Evaluation. TORS 2(1) (March 7th, 2024; online August 4th, 2023). DOI 10.1145/3613455. arXiv:2309.05892 [cs.IR]. NSF PAR 10461937. Cited 16 times. Cited 9 times.

FnT22
2022

M. D. Ekstrand, A. Das, R. Burke, and F. Diaz. 2022. Fairness in Information Access Systems. FnT IR 16(1–2) (July 11th, 2022). DOI 10.1561/1500000079. arXiv:2105.05779 [cs.IR]. NSF PAR 10347630. Impact factor: 8. Cited 183 times. Cited 83 times.

SIGIR22
2022

A. Raj and M. D. Ekstrand. 2022. Measuring Fairness in Ranked Results: An Analytical and Empirical Comparison. Proc. SIGIR ’22. DOI 10.1145/3477495.3532018. NSF PAR 10329880. Acceptance rate: 20%. Cited 59 times. Cited 44 times.

UMUAI21
2021

M. D. Ekstrand and D. Kluver. 2021. Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. UMUAI 31(3) (February 4th, 2021). DOI 10.1007/s11257-020-09284-2. arXiv:1808.07586v2. NSF PAR 10218853. Impact factor: 4.412. Cited 201 times (shared with RecSys18◊). Cited 107 times (shared with RecSys18◊).

CIKM20-ee
2020

F. Diaz, B. Mitra, M. D. Ekstrand, A. J. Biega, and B. Carterette. 2020. Evaluating Stochastic Rankings with Expected Exposure. Proc. CIKM ’20. DOI 10.1145/3340531.3411962. arXiv:2004.13157 [cs.IR]. NSF PAR 10199451. Acceptance rate: 20%. Nominated for Best Long Paper. Cited 187 times. Cited 166 times.

Professional Service & Memberships

  • Associate editor, ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems
  • Editorial board, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval
  • Co-organizer, TREC 2019–2021 Track on Fairness in Information Retrieval
  • ACM RecSys (Program chair 2022, General chair 2018, Steering Committee & SPC member)
  • ACM FAccT (Executive Committee 2020–2023, Steering Committee 2017–2023, Network Co-chair, PC 2017–present)
  • Organizer, FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation at RecSys 2017/2018/2020
  • AC for SIGIR, FAccT; SPC for RecSys; numerous other reviews