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Short Bio

I am a Professor and EPSRC Fellow at University College London, Department of Computer Science. I am also a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and an ELLIS fellow. At UCL I am one of the faculty members affiliated with the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, where I lead the Web Intelligence Group. I also work as an Amazon Scholar for Amazon, where I work with the Alexa Shopping team.

My research interests lie in the fields of information retrieval and natural language processing. My research in these areas is mainly guided by principles from machine learning, statistics and information theory. I have authored more than 135 papers in these areas (> 5,100 citations, H-index = 34). I have been awarded two best paper awards (ACM ICTIR 2022 Best Student Paper and ACM CHIIR 2017 Best Paper), and was nominated for a best paper award several times (ACM WSDM 2011, ACM SIGIR 2010 and 2009).

I have received several awards for my research, including the Karen Sparck Jones Award, a Google Faculty Research Award and a Bloomberg Data Science Research Award. I am also a recipient of an EPSRC fellowship. My research has been funded by several funding bodies including EU Horizon 2020, EPSRC, Alan Turing Institute, Google and Bloomberg and Elsevier.

I have served in various senior roles, including co-editor-in-chief for the Information Retrieval Journal, a member of the editorial board for the AI Journal and an elected member of the executive committee for ACM SIGIR. I currently serve as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Information Systems and am a member of the Steering Committee for ACM SIGIR Asia-Pacific. I have served in various roles including PC Chair for ACM CIKM 2022 Applied Track, ECIR 2020, ACM SIGIR 2018 and ACM ICTIR 2017 Conferences, Industry Chair for ACM SIGIR 2023, Panels Chair for The Web Conference (WWW) 2021, Practice and Experience Chair for ACM WSDM 2017, and as the Doctoral Consortium Chair for ECIR 2017.

Since 2019 I have been a co-organising the TREC Deep Learning Track, funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Between 2015-2017 I co-organised the TREC Tasks Track. More information on the Tasks Track can be found here.

Please refer to my scholar page or DBLP for a list of publications.

I am currently recruiting new PhD students and postdocs. Interested applicants with strong backgrounds in machine learning, probability and statistics are highly encouraged to contact me via email.

Group Members

• Dr Xi Wang, Post-doc researcher (April 2022 - now)

• Hossein Saeed Rahmani, PhD student (November 2022 - now)

• Yue Feng, PhD student (September 2020 - now)

• Fanghua Ye, PhD student (September 2019 - now)

• Omer Kirnap, PhD student (December 2018 - now)

• Sahan Bulathwella, PhD student (October 2018 - now)

• Zhixiang Wang, Phd student as second supervisor (September 2021 - now )

Previous PhD Students/Post-docs

• Prochata Sen, Post-doc researcher (December 2021 - 2022) [now Assistant Professor at University of Liverpool]

• Ruizhe Li, Post-doc researcher (August 2021 - 2022) [now Assistant Professor at University of Aberdeen]

• Qiang Zhang, PhD student (October 2017 - 2021) [now Assistant Professor at Zhejiang University]

• Bhaskar Mitra, PhD student (February 2016 – 2021) [now Principle Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge]

• Jarana Manotumruksa, Post-doc researcher (April 2019 - 2020) [now Researcher at OneSpan]

• Andrew Burnie, PhD student, Turing Institute (September 2017 - 2020) [now Director at ActionAI]

• Aldo Lipani, Post-doc researcher (October 2018 - 2019) [now Assistant Professor at UCL]

• Rishabh Mehrotra, PhD student (February 2014 – 2018) [now Director at ShareChat]

• Manisha Verma, PhD student (November 2013 – 2017) [now Researcher at Amazon]

• Shangsong Liang, Post-doc researcher (May 2015 – 2017) [now Assistant Professor at Sun-yat-sen University]

Latest News

• December 2022 - I gave a keynote talk at the Forty-second SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• November 2022 - I received a research award from Google.

• October 2022 - I co-organised the Workshop on Proactive and Agent-Supported Information Retrieval.

• October 2022 - Our demo paper has been accepted to AAAI 2023.

• October 2022 - We have a paper accepted for the EMNLP 2022 Conference.

• September 2022 - I will be serving as a PC Chair for ACM CIKM 2023 Short Papers Track and as Industry Chair for ACM SIGIR 2023.

• July 2022 - Our work with PhD student Xiao Wu received the best student paper award at ACM ICTIR 2022.

• July 2022 - I gave a keynote talk at the ACM ICTIR 2022 Conference.

• July 2022 - We have a paper accepted to ACM SIGDial 2022.