Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র

@bmitra

Information Retrieval Researcher ✊🏽🍉🕊️ | Pronouns: He/him Homepage:

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Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· 21d

Had a couple of separate chats after my #SIGIR2026 keynote yesterday where we talked about book recommendations for computer scientists who want to grow their critical political understanding. So, here's my list of favorite books: bhaskar-mitra.github.io/reading/. I hope you find them useful!

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· 28d

Bar chart of the top 20 most militarized universities.

Bar chart of universities with arm investments.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Jun 3

Excited to announce that our paper “From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion” has been accepted at #ICTIR2026! 🎉📚 📄Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11453 💻 Code: github.com/sadjadeb/Dif... A quick 🧵...

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· May 28

Listening to @harshawalia.bsky.social at the "Migrant justice x climate justice: a necessary convergence" event at Concordia.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· May 20

Such a wonderful visual summary of my recent keynote 🎤 at #CALC26 📚 conference. Huge thanks to Becky Ullah (Sketchnotes UK) for capturing this so brilliantly, and to @patchedelbows.bsky.social and @michelleab.bsky.social for inviting me to the conference. 🙏🏽 Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/17qM5...

Sketchnote of my keynote address at CALC 2026 conference.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· May 2

Happy May Day! ✊🏽

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Apr 10

#NoPeaceOnStolenLand

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Apr 9

Montreal stands with the people of Iran. Down with imperialism and colonialism. #HandsOffOfIran #HandsOffOfLebanon #FreePalestine

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Mar 31

...an engaging panel with critical conversations between Madeleine Daepp, @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy, @sannevrijenhoek.bsky.social, and myself, moderated by my wonderful co-track chair @mariaheuss.bsky.social. #ECIR2026 #IR4Good (Photo credit: @arjenpdevries.bsky.social) /4

Photo of the panelists and moderator on stage.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Mar 29

I'm attending #ECIR2026 this week. @mariaheuss.bsky.social and I are looking forward to welcoming you at the #IR4Good track tomorrow. We have a really exciting agenda this year. Please join us if you are attending ECIR.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Mar 12

This Monday, I had the pleasure of co-organizing a People's Consultation on AI event (background: www.peoplesaiconsultation.ca) in Toronto with fellow members of @twcnewsletter.bsky.social Canada and members of @techfordemocracy.bsky.social. #PCAI #Canada >>

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Mar 8

Abolish patriarchy. Abolish colonialism. Abolish imperialism. Abolish capitalism. Happy International Women's Day!

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Feb 8

#AnaFalastini

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Jan 31

"I am the sea In my depths all treasures dwell."

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Jan 31

Such a heart-wrenchingly beautiful movie.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Jan 20

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.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Dec 27

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".

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Dec 20

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.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Dec 18

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...

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Dec 15

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.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Dec 9

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

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Dec 8

After months of hard work from so many people, super excited to welcome everyone to SIGIR-AP 2025 at the conference opening today. #SIGIRAP2025

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Nov 12

Montreal, you are beautiful! ❤️

Photo from my balcony looking over Montreal downtown under a light blanket of snow at sunset.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Oct 18

*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.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Oct 4

In our lifetime Palestine will be free. ✊🏽 🇵🇸 🍉 🕊️

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Sep 26

Look who just joined Bluesky! 👀 It's @acmsigir.bsky.social. 😇

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Sep 26

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.

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Sep 16

📣 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

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Sep 10

It's deadline day! 🏃🏾‍♂️‍➡️🏃🏾‍➡️🏃🏾‍♀️‍➡️ #TREC2025 #TRECToT #TREC2025ToT

Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra· Sep 8

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?