I am currently a PhD student in Information Science at Drexel University, where I work under the supervision of Dr. Michael Ekstrand at the INERTIAL Lab. My research focuses on studying and evaluating information access systems, particularly recommender systems, to ensure they are used effectively and equitably for the benefit of the diverse stakeholders involved.
Before joining Drexel, I earned my MSc in Computer Engineering (AI specialization) from K. N. Toosi University of Technology. During my time there, I studied bias in ranking and recommendation at the Textual Intelligent Systems Lab.

A particularly interesting question that motivates me at this stage is how we assess progress as retrieval and recommendation systems move from one state to another, and whether our evaluation methodologies accurately capture the improvements we aim to achieve. More specifically, I am interested in understanding how evaluation methods and tools can fail, when their underlying assumptions break down, and how they can be adapted to different contexts so that measured outcomes remain valid, reliable, and representative of the qualities we actually want to optimize. After all, a statistically significant result is much more interesting when it is also significant in every other sense!

I’m always open to collaboration, discussion, or just sharing ideas. Feel free to get in touch!

Publications

• User and Recommender Behavior Over Time: Contextualizing Activity, Effectiveness, Diversity, and Fairness in Book Recommendation
  Samira Vaez Barenji, Sushobhan Parajuli, Michael D. Ekstrand
  In 8th Workshop on Fairness in User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (FairUMAP 2025)

• DIPT: Diversified Personalized Transformer for QAC systems
  Mahdi Dehghani, Samira Vaez Barenji, Saeed Farzi
  In 13th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE 2023)

• Managing multi-faceted bias in collaborative filtering recommender systems
  Samira Vaez Barenji, Saeed Farzi
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.10575

News

• June 16–19, 2025
  Attended UMAP 2025 in New York and presented our paper. Great talks, great discussions, and lots to think about afterward.

• April 28, 2025
  Our paper “User and Recommender Behavior Over Time” is accepted to the FairUMAP 2025 workshop at ACM UMAP!

• September 23, 2024
  I began my PhD in Information Science at Drexel University.