Fernando Diaz

Fernando Diaz is a research scientist at Google. Fernando’s research focuses on the design of information access systems, including search engines, music recommendation services and crisis response platforms. He is particularly interested in understanding and addressing the societal implications of artificial intelligence more generally. Previously, Fernando was the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Montréal, where he also led FATE Montréal, and a director of research at Spotify, where he helped establish 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), FAT* (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.