Falk Scholer

I'm a Professor of Information Access and Retrieval Technologies in the discipline of Data Science, in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

My research in the area of information access and retrieval focuses on understanding how tools such as search engines  and recommender systems can assist users to resolve their information needs, and how their effectiveness can be measured. 

I'm a founding Director of the RMIT Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI), a research centre that brings together experts from the computing, information and social sciences to solve problems on information access and retrieval, including search engines, recommender systems, chatbots and LLMs. 

Other key research interests include the fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of systems and algorithms (as part of the ARC Center of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society), and misinformation, fake news and fact-checking (as part of the RMIT FactLab research hub). 

I also teach a range of courses, including web development and programming, data science, HCI, databases, and information retrieval. I'm also the Program Manager for the postgraduate Master of Data Science. 

In the area of human research ethics, I am the Deputy Chair of the RMIT Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC).