HERCOLE Lab Presented a Position Paper at ECIR 2026

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to share that HERCOLE Lab presented a position paper at ECIR 2026 in Delft as part of the IR for Good track.

The paper, From Engagement to Empowerment: A Capability-Theoretic Rethinking of Recommender Systems, argues for a fundamental shift in how recommender systems are conceived and evaluated. Rather than focusing only on engagement, optimization, and immediate utility, the work calls for recommender systems that support the real freedoms people have to do and be what they value.

This position paper highlights a different set of questions for the recommender systems community. How can we design systems that strengthen human agency instead of merely capturing attention? Which gaps in current recommendation pipelines prevent genuine human flourishing? And what would it mean to build recommender systems that empower users rather than simply maximizing short-term interaction?

By bringing these questions into the Information Retrieval community, the paper contributes to the growing conversation around ethical, human-centered, and socially responsible recommender systems. We are excited to see HERCOLE Lab contribute to this broader rethinking of the role recommendation technologies should play in people’s lives.

Congratulations to Vittoria Vineis and Gabriele Tolomei on this contribution.

The paper is available here: Springer link

ECIR2026 | HERCOLE Lab

HERCOLE Lab Presented a Position Paper at ECIR 2026