Fernando Diaz

Fernando Diaz is an Associate Professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University and a research scientist at Google Research.  Fernando’s background is in the design and evaluation of search engines and recommender systems.  His current research covers three themes: quantitatively evaluating AI systems, retrieval-enhanced AI, and understanding the cultural impact of AI in domains like music and literature through interdisciplinary collaborations.  Having held both individual contributor and senior leadership positions in industry, Fernando is particularly interested in the deployment of real AI systems. Previously, Fernando was the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Montréal, where he also led FATE Montréal, and director of research at Spotify, where he built its research organization on recommendation, search, and personalization. Fernando’s work has received special recognition and awards at SIGIR, CIKM, CSCW, WSDM, ISCRAM, and ECIR. He is the recipient of the 2017 British Computer Society Karen Spärck Jones Award and holds a CIFAR AI Chair. Fernando has co-organized several NIST TREC tracks, WSDM (2013), Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (2018), FAccT (2019), SIGIR (2021), and the CIFAR Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and the Curation of Culture (2019).  He received his BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and his MS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.