Research

Research Interests

My research is in the area of Information Access and Retrieval. Particular focus areas include:

• Information access and retrieval systems

• Evaluation and measurement

• Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics (FATE*) of AI and algorithms

• Misinformation, fake news and fact-checking

• User analytics, relevance and perception

• Enterprise and e-commerce search

• Biomedical search

Research Roles

My research-related roles include:

• Founding Director of the RMIT Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI) at RMIT University

• Associate investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society 

• Member of the Information Storage, Analysis and Retrieval (ISAR) research group

• Member of RMIT FactLab

Publications

A list of my publications can be found on the Publications page of this site. 

My Google Scholar page includes links to most of my papers. 

Additional publication lists and details are available from my Semantic Scholar and DBLP Computer Science Bibliography pages.

Research Supervision

If you are interested in doing a higher degree by research and believe that we might have shared research interests, I'd be happy to discuss potential projects. However, please read this first.

Current and Past Research Students

• Marwah Alaofi (PhD, current)

• Ameer Albahem ("Evaluating Dynamic Search Systems for Interactive Complex Tasks", PhD, 2021)

• Abdul Mohsen Afaf M Almalawi ("Similarity Scores and Anchor Text for Effective Query Difficulty Prediction", MBC, 2009)

• Neeraj Arora ("Searching Using Bookmarks", Honours, 2007)

• Jelita Asian ("Effective Techniques for Indonesian Text Retrieval", PhD, 2007)

• Valeriia Baranova ("Multi-Document Non-Factoid Question Answering", PhD, 2024)

• Graham Bennett ("A Comparative Study of Language Models for Information Retrieval", MBC, 2006)

• Bodo von Billerbeck ("Efficient Query Expansion", PhD, 2005)

• Laeticia Bucktowar ("Credibility of Answers in Search Results", Honours, 2020)

• Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal ("Fairness-Aware Question Answering for Intelligent Assistants", PhD, 2025) 

• Tadele Damessie ("Topic Difficulty and Order of Document Presentation in Relevance Assessments", PhD, 2019)

• Jasbir Dhaliwal ("Space Efficient Algorithms for String Processing", PhD, 2013)

• Michael Harris ("Effective Retrieval to Support Learning", PhD, 2011)

• Chris Hoobin ("Efficient Compression of Large Repetitive Strings", PhD, 2015)

• Mujtaba Hussain ("Anticipating Search Needs in Real Time Help Desk Environments", Honours, 2008)

• Kaixin Ji (PhD, current)

• Sarvnaz Karimi ("Machine Transliteration of Proper Names between English and Persian", PhD, 2008)

• Sadegh Kharazmi ("Diversity in Information Retrieval", PhD, 2015)

• Rosette Kidwani ("Maintaining Data Cubes Under Slowly Changing Dimensions", MPhil, 2007)

• Binh Chon Nhut Le ("Investigating Algorithmic Bias Via Crowdsourcing", MBC, 2020)

• Pengfei Vincent Li ("Transfer Learning for Information Retrieval", PhD, 2019)

• Lorena Leal Bando ("Effective Summarisation for Search Engines", PhD, 2013)

• Joel Mackenzie ("Managing Tail Latency in Large Scale Information Retrieval Systems", PhD, 2019)

• Hilal Ali Abdullah Al Maqbali ("Using Eye Tracking for Evaluation of Information Visualisation in Web Search Interfaces", PhD, 2013)

• Ahmed Mourad ("Influence of Geographic Biases on Geolocation Prediction in Twitter", PhD, 2020)

• Abdusalam Nwesri ("Effective Retrieval Techniques for Arabic Text", PhD, 2008)

• Kevin Ong ("Search Behaviour and Relevance Judgments in Different Search Environments", PhD, 2021)

• Nuha Abu Onq (PhD, current)

• Justin Perrie (PhD, current)

• Matthias Petri ("Scalable Succinct Indexing for Large Text Collections", PhD, 2013)

• Seyedeh Sargol Sadeghi ("Identification of Re-finding Tasks and Search Difficulty", PhD, 2015)

• Arturo Sandoval Rodriguez (PhD, current)

• Milad Shokouhi ("Federated Text Retrieval from Independent Collections", PhD, 2008)

• Iman Suyoto ("Cross-Domain Content-Based Retrieval of Audio Music through Transcription", PhD, 2009)

• Leila Tavakoli ("Evaluating engaging clarification questions in information retrieval", PhD, 2024)

• Marcel Tjandraatmadja ("Answer Consistency for Search Engines", Honours, 2005)

• Evi Yulianti ("Answer-biased Summarisation", PhD, 2018)

• Oleg Zendel ("New Perspectives on Query Performance Prediction", PhD, 2024)