Philipp Lorenz-Spreen is leading the research group “Computational Social Science” at the Center Synergy of Systems at TU Dresden. He has also been conducting research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development since completing his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at TU Berlin, where he studied the dynamics of collective attention. His research focuses on the complexity of self-organized online discourse and its impact on democracies worldwide. His goal is to better understand the interplay between human behavior and the connectivity and functioning of online platforms, particularly how this affects public discourse. However, he also aims to challenge the status quo and explore how this technology offers untapped opportunities for an improved information ecosystem and participatory democracy in the online sphere.

Bhaskar Mitra is an independent researcher based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal, Canada. His research focuses on the intersection of online information access, machine learning / AI, and questions of social justice and emancipation. He is currently serving as the ACM SIGIR Secretary and as an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) journal. He has received several awards for his research, including two ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Awards (2024) for excellence in research and in community engagement. He received his Ph.D. (2021) in Computer Science from University College London. He previously worked at Microsoft for 19 years, first at Bing and then at Microsoft Research. However, in 2025, he made the decision to leave Big Tech and the broader for-profit tech industry in objection to their harmful impact on society.