Bio

Dr. Ekstrand studies how people and intelligent information systems interact, working with the People and Information Research Team (PIReT) to answer a wide array of questions in human-computer interaction, recommender systems, information retrieval, and user-facing artificial intelligence applications.

His research seeks to build better recommendation and information access experiences for users by applying psychological insights and algorithmic innovation, understand the ways in which the system and its users affect and change each other, and promote the recommender systems research.

Before joining Boise State in 2016, he earned his Ph.D with GroupLens Research in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and was an assistant professor for two years at Texas State University.

Dr. Ekstrand’s personal site contains more information about his research activities and teaching

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota
• B.S. in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University

Research

Dr. Michael D. Ekstrand specializes in researching human-computer interaction regarding recommender systems.

Michael has built a number of open-source software packages, open-source software distribution being a key part of his research. Recent examples include: LenKit – a toolkit for building, researching, and studying recommender systems, and Grapht – a dependency injection framework for Java with novel configuration and static analysis capabilities.

Areas of Interest

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Recommender Systems
• Intelligent Information Systems
• Information Retrieval
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• CS Education