Jérémie Poiroux

Latest News

• 2026 12 07 Upcoming: second day of the THEMIS cycle on audience indicators, "What audience indicators do to culture" [fr], at the Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille). It will focus on how cultural institutions and their supervising bodies use these indicators, and with what effects on programming, relations with audiences, management, and public policy.
• 2026 09 21 I was interviewed by Adrien Cornelissen for the article "Derrière le vertige des données, comment mesurer l’impact de la culture ?" [fr], published on Hacnumedia
• 2026 06 12 I co-organised the first day of the THEMIS cycle on audience indicators, "The making of audience indicators in culture" [fr], at the MUCEM (Marseille). It brought together staff of cultural institutions, cultural engineering professionals, and social scientists; I opened the day and chaired the discussion with the engineering professionals.
• 2026 05 22 I presented the article "AI and the Disengagement of the State: Algorithmic Targeting of Ship Inspections" at the AI club of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition (Paris) and the "AI and social sciences" seminar of the EHESS (Paris)
• 2025 09 15 I have started a postdoc at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay
• 2025 04 01 The article "AI and the Disengagement of the State: Algorithmic Targeting of Ship Inspections", has been published in the latest issue of Multitudes [fr]

Academic Experience

• since 2025 09 Postdoctoral researcher, Research Program ICCARE, École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay.
  I am currently conducting a study within a start-up and several cultural organizations to examine how audience data are concretely collected, used, and valorized. My research analyzes their uses at the intersection of performance management, evaluation requirements, and cultural marketing strategies. I am under the supervision of Volny Fages, PI of THEMIS, a sub of the national research program on cultural and creative industries ICCARE. I am also affiliated with the IDHE.S (Institutions and Historical Dynamics of the Economy and the Society) joint research center.
• 2024 02 > 2025 01 Postdoctoral researcher, JSPS, The University of Tokyo.
  I aimed at building a socio-informatics mapping of goals and characteristics of music recommender systems. As a JSPS fellow, I was affiliated with the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology and the Japanese-French Laboratory of Informatics, under the co-supervision of Ryohei Hisano and Philippe Codognet.
• 2023 08 > 2023 12 Research assistant, ERC Socsemics, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin.
  I was in charge of the qualitative part of a study of the political participation on Twitter in 2020 (15 interviews), within the computational social science team, under the supervision of Camille Roth (CNRS).
• 2018 11 > 2023 10 PhD candidate, CNRS, Centre Marc Bloch.
  I studied the manufacture, the design and the use of recommender and decision-making systems in organisations (100+ interviews), under the supervision of Camille Roth and Francis Chateauraynaud (EHESS). I was funded by a CNRS doctoral contract.
  During my PhD, I paid a visit to the Maison française d'Oxford (2023), the French-Australian laboratory for human-autonomous agents teaming (CROSSING), Adelaide (2023) and the National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan (2022), I reviewed papers for the ACM Conference Designing Interactive Systems in 2021 and 2022, co-organised a writing workshop (2020) and co-supervised two interns, Jonas Stein and Quentin Villermet (2020). At Centre Marc Bloch, I was also a doctoral students representative (from 2019 to 2021). Finally, I gave some classes in sociology and project management at Télécom St-Etienne, France (2018, 2019) and in digital cultures at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2019).
• 2017 > 2018 Research assistant, ANR Algodiv, Centre Marc Bloch.
  I led a qualitative study of the manufacture of recommender systems by engineers (30 interviews), under the supervision of Camille Roth.

Academic Work

Practices of AI

• Submitted Poiroux, J., Roth, C. "AlgoWorks" [code name].
• 2025 Poiroux, J. AI and the Disengagement of the State: Algorithmic Targeting of Ship Inspections. Multitudes Mineure 98, Misadventures of the Bureaucratic Algorithm, 190-196 [in French].
  
• 2024 Poiroux, J. Disengagement through Algorithms: How Traditional Organizations Aim for Experts’ Satisfaction. Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society 7, 1145–1156 [pdf].
  Presented at the AI Ethics and Governance Lab, CAIRE, HKUST (Hong Kong, 2024), at the AIES conference (San José, CA, 2024), at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (Melbourne, 2023), and at the French-Australian laboratory for human-autonomous agents teaming (Adelaide, 2023).
• 2023 Poiroux, J., Maudet, N., Pineau, K., Brulé, E., & Tabard, A. Design Indirections: How Designers Find Their Ways in Shaping Algorithmic Systems. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 33, 173–204 [pdf].
  Presented at the 4S conference (Honolulu – online, 2023), and at the WZB Social Science Center (Berlin, 2022).
• 2022 Roth, C., Poiroux, J. Guiding Code Development: The Case of Recommender Systems. RESET [in French] [pdf].
  Presented at the University of Waseda (Tokyo, 2024), at the STS-CH conference (Basel, 2023), at the International Conference on Organisational Sociology (Trondheim, 2022), at the Centre for Research on Media Innovations (Oslo, 2022), at the CNRS Center for Internet and Society (Paris, 2022), and at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society conference Infrastructures of Autonomy (Berlin, 2022).

Culture & Technology

• Submitted Poiroux, J. "RecOps" [code name].
• Submitted Poiroux, J., Shakespeare, D. "Crossfade" [code name].
Presented at the conference "Japan and sound: modernity, social constructs and power relations" (Bordeaux, 2024).
• 2022 Poiroux, J. Algorithmic cultural recommendation. Publictionnaire, online encyclopaedic dictionary of publics [fr].
• 2021 Poiroux, J. Algorithms behind the controls. La vie des Idées [fr].
• 2021 Villermet, Q., Poiroux, J., Moussallam, M., Louail, T., & Roth, C. Follow the guides: disentangling human and algorithmic curation in online music consumption. RecSys '21: Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 380–389. Honorable mention: best paper.

PhD Thesis

• 2023 The Design of Algorithms: Manufacture and Impact within Organizations. A Sociology of Engagement and Disengagement Processes in a Computational Regime.
  Supervised by Camille Roth and Francis Chateauraynaud. Defended at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris, before a committee composed of Cécile Méadel (president), Jean-Samuel Beuscart (reviewer), Antoinette Rouvroy (reviewer), Nicolas Benvegnu, and Thierry Ménissier.
  This thesis aims to take a pragmatic look at the "algorithmisation" of recommendation and decision-making within organisations. It lies at the intersection of research that explores the use of automation and evaluation technologies in organisations and that which questions the intentions and opacity of algorithms. Starting from the premise that the initial step in algorithmisation is the "datafication" (sometimes massive) of consumption and decision-making activities, we draw upon the concept of "algorithmic governmentality" to examine how designers and users of algorithms harness them to achieve their objectives. To accomplish this, we conducted four studies involving around a hundred actors (initiators, engineers, digital designers, and users) of recommendation algorithms and organisational algorithms. We demonstrate, in particular, that initiators employ algorithms – crafted by engineers and digital designers – not to automate actions but to disengage from any cultural or decision-making prescription. Consequently, it falls upon users to make choices and become engaged. In the case of recommendation, algorithm evaluation is oriented towards consumption, while for decisions support, priority is given to utility and interpretability of results. This conclusion suggests the emergence of a "satisfaction regime," providing an optimal framework for initiators to align objectives related to organisation and use.

Degrees

• 2023 PhD in sociology, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris.
  
• 2017 Master in social sciences, major in design and information architecture, École Normale Supérieure of Lyon.
  I did an internship and wrote the master thesis "An Experiment to Visualise Socio-semantic Confinement on Twitter" under the supervision of Camille Roth (2017), which was the start of the research journey with him. I spent one Erasmus semester at the University of Oslo, where I took classes in design and education (2016).
• 2014 Bachelor in communication studies, major in journalism, University Paris VIII (in collaboration with Radio France).
  
• 2013 Advanced technical degree in audiovisual studies, major in production management, National Audiovisual Institute (Ina), Paris.
  

Non-academic Skills

• I can work in English, French and German, and order food in Japanese —
  いただきます.
  
• Although it’s been a while (2016), I am a proud co-founder and first co-president of two French non-profit organisations, Designers Éthiques and Éditions Kaïa. The former (still) promotes sustainable digital design. In the beginning, we mainly organised events under the brand Ethics by design, including the first one in Lyon (2017) and a bigger one in Paris (2018). Besides, we managed a community of designers. With Éditions Kaïa, my enthusiastic mates and I printed online journalistic stories on high quality paper booklets, we then shipped to loyal subscribers. Unfortunately, the project has been paused in 2019. These two experiences probably find their roots in the modest consulting activity I co-managed while studying in Lyon (2015).

Research tools

Browser-based tools I built for my own research work. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and nothing leaves your browser.

• Rescribe: A tool to clean up AI-generated interview transcripts while listening back. Built for the "second pass" workflow: you already have a machine transcription, and you fix it while listening. Inspired by oTranscribe, with a bilingual interface (English and French). Use it. Fork it.
• Elide: A tool to anonymize research interviews. Import transcripts (.txt, .docx, or Rescribe files), detect names, places, organizations, and dates with a multilingual model (French, English, German) that runs locally in the browser, correct or tag by hand, replace names with pseudonyms, and export the anonymized text as .txt, .pdf, or .docx. A further tool for LLM-assisted coding and analysis of interviews is planned. Use it. Fork it.
• Debate timer: A moderation tool for live discussions, with real-time speaking time tracking per participant. Visual balance indicators signal when a speaker has talked significantly more or less than the group average. A teleprompter mode lets the moderator navigate structured notes section by section during the session. Use it. Fork it.
• Slide timer: A mobile-first presentation timer that tracks your pace slide by slide. A rehearsal mode records actual durations during practice, then carries those timings directly into a configured run. Use it. Fork it.