My students were travelling and presenting. Julius Odede presented our work on JayBot, a chatbot to aid university students and admissions, at CHIIR 2024 in Sheffield. Kanishka Silva presented our work on authorship attribution for LLM-generated novels in Malta at EACL 2024.
I wrote an evidence piece about "The future of news: impartiality, trust, and technology" for the UK House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee.
Protect our environment from information overload – our opinion piece published in Nature Human Behaviour with our OMINO partners.
I'm happy to be co-organiser of the Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources (HTRes 2024) workshop at LREC-COLING. Please consider submitting to the workshop.
Our Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop (BIR 2024) took place
at ECIR 2024. More info on the BIR 2024 web site.
ACM CIKM 2023, the 32nd ACM
International Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management, took place in Birmingham, UK, October 21-25, 2023. CIKM received around 2,500
submissions,
from which around 650 were accepted, with approximately 750 registered delegates who enjoyed a
weekend of
tutorials, PhD consortium industry day, workshops and the main conference.
About me
I am Reader (Associate Professor
equivalent) in Data Science in the
School
of Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. I am the head and
founder of the Data Science, AI, Information Retrieval and NLP research group DAIREL. Furthermore, I am Adjunct Professor (Lehrbeauftragter) at
the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.
With a general interest in Data Science
and Artificial Intelligence
(AI), my focus is on human-centric Information Retrieval, generative AI and
its application in disciplines such as
Digital Libraries. I was general chair
of ACM CIKM 2023.
Prior to this, I was Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and
Technology of the University of Bedfordshire in
Luton, UK. I was a member of the Information Retrieval group
at the School of Computing Science of the College of Science and Engineering
at the University of Glasgow. Before I was working in the Information Systems Working Group at the
Faculty of Engineering of the University of Duisburg-Essen, where I did my PhD
on information
modelling and retrieval based on user annotations.
Before joining the group in Duisburg, I worked at Fraunhofer IPSI
on annotation-based retrieval in Digital
Humanities.
I hold a PhD from the University
of Duisburg-Essen and Diploma (Diplom-Informatiker, MSc equivalent) in Computer Science
from the University
of Dortmund. I am a BCS
Fellow as well as a Fellow of the Higher Education
Academy.
I am the University of Wolverhampton's Principle Investigator of the EU Horizon Europe Marie
Skłodowska Curie Staff Exchange project OMINO (Overcoming
Multilevel INformation Overload). In this project, we apply information retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation and generative AI to tackle information overload.
I was the University of Bedfordshire's Principal
Investigator of the EU H2020 Innovative
Training Network QUARTZ
(Quantum Information Access and Retrieval Theory), which is
concerned with formal approaches to Information Access and Retrieval
based on the quantum mechanical framework. Furthermore, I have been leading and working in several
national and international research and knowledge transfer projects.
Research Interests
The aim of my main lines of research is to tackle information overload (see our Nature Human Behaviour article) by
supporting users in finding relevant information in large data collections more effectively. To this
end, I utilise my Computer Science background and amalgamate methods from AI, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Information Science, NLP and Data Science. I employ cognitive and human-centric theories and combine these with mathematical modelling (e.g., quantum
mechanical models), (generative) AI, machine learning and embedding models to bring the human into the loop.
In particular, I have been working on the following topics (links lead to peer-reviewed example
papers):
Please contact me if you are interested in a BSc, MSc
or PhD project in
these areas.
Research/Knowledge Transfer Projects
I have been PI and been involved in several national and international research and knowledge transfer
projects.
Research Projects
- OMINO - Overcoming Multilevel INformation Overload -
PI of the EU Horizon Europe MSCA Staff Exchange project (guarantee funded by UKRI)
to tackle information overload for instance in academic search and recommendation (PI)
- RIGHT - Responsible Digital Humanities Lab -
Digital Humanities with Deep Learning and NLP.
Internally funded project at the University of Wolverhampton (PI)
- LASER -
Large Language Models for Academic Search and Retrieval. Internally funded PhD project at the
University of
Wolverhampton (PI)
- Quantum Information
Access and Retrieval (QUARTZ), an EU H2020 Innovative Training
Network (PI)
- EDISON, an EU H2020
Coordination and Support Action with the purpose of accelerating
the creation of the Data Science profession. I established the University of Bedfordshire as
Data Science Champion University.
- Renaissance
- Modelling Information Retrieval processes using the formalism of
Quantum Theory. EPSRC project.
- INEX Interactive Track 2010
- POLAR
- Probabilistic Object-oriented Logics for Annotation-based
Retrieval (my own PhD project)
- CLASSIX
- Classification and Intelligent Search on Information in
XML. DFG (German Research Foundation) project.
- Initiative
for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX)
- LACOSTIR
- LAyout, COntent and STructure in Interactive Retrieval. DFG (German Research Foundation)
project.
- DELOS
- EU-FP6 Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries
- DAFFODIL
- Distributed Agents for User-Friendly Access of Digital
Libraries. DFG (German Research Foundation) project.
- COLLATE -
Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of
Digitized Historical Archive Material. EU-FP5 project.
- BRICKS -
Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services. EU-FP6 project.
- SCHOLNET
- A Digital Library Testbed to Support Networked
Scholarly Communities. EU-FP5 project
- VIP-Advisor
- Virtual, independent advisor for personal insurance
and finance risk management. EU-FP5 project.
Knowledge Transfer Projects
- SOLVD -
EU European Regional Development Fund project to support Telford &
Wrekin and Shropshire small and medium sized
enterprises (SMEs) in the adoption of digital technologies
-
KIIB, EU-EUREGIO project on business processes and email classification, with d.velop AG, Gescher,
Germany. (PI)
- Talking Objects, Augmented Reality in museums for children
(PI, with Luton Culture
and Luton Wardown Park Museum)
- Knowledge Transfer Project with Drax Technology
on Internet of Things and intelligent fire alarms
(lead academic)
- Great
War Stories - A crowdsourced digital museum about World War I as
experienced by the people in Luton, a town in England (PI)
- Intelligent Executive Search, a commercial search engine
for executives (private commercial consultancy project)
- Several Innovation Voucher and Innovation Bridge projects
Research Supervision
Completed PhD Projects
- Amit Kumar Jaiswal: Investigation of Quantum-inspired Modelling in Interactive Search based
on Information Foraging Theory. Awarded 2023. Second Supervisor.
- Mahmoud Artemi: A Theory-based Content-based Image Retrieval Approach for Capturing User
Preferences during Query Formulation. Awarded 2022. Second Supervisor.
- Nicholas Collis: AQUACOLD - Aggregated Query Understanding and Construction Over Linked
Data.
Awarded 2021. First Supervisor.
- Karen Chessum: A Conceptual Framework to Support Cross-cultural User Experience Design for
Web Search. Awarded March 2021. First Supervisor.
- Tess Crosbie: A Computer Assisted Analysis of Literary Text: From Feature Analysis to
Judgements of Literary Merit.
Awarded 2017. Second Supervisor.
- Ghulam Mustafa: An Examination of Artificial Neural Networks for Contextual
Recommendation.
Awarded 2017. First Supervisor.
- Kamran Abbasi: A Probabilistic Approach for Cluster Based Polyrepresentative Information
Retrieval.
Awarded 2015. First Supervisor.
- Obaid Almalki: A Framework for e-Government Success from the User’s Perspective.
Awarded 2015. Second Supervisor.
Completed MSc by Research Projects
- Usman Ali: Use of Machine Learning to Reduce False Alarms.
Awarded 2021. First Supervisor.
- Sebastian Grygiel: Developing and Evaluating a Cost-effective Solution for Augumented
Reality Conversational Agents for Museums.
Awarded 2019. First Supervisor.
Teaching
I am coordinator of the MSc
Computer Science and Data Science and MSc
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence online MSc Programmes at the University of
Wolverhampton.
I was the coordinator of the BSc
(Hons) Information and Data Systems, BSc (Hons) Information Systems and BSc (Hons) Data Science courses/programmes during my time at the
University of Bedfordshire.
Topics I have been teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate
level comprise:
- Information Retrieval
- AI and Machine Learning
- Information Engineering
- Data Mining
- Web Science and Semantic Web
- Programming (mainly Java)
- Databases
- Data Modelling and Management
- Distributed and Parallel Computing
Some of my research-related activities include:
-
General Chair of the 32nd ACM Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management (CIKM 2023), Birmingham, UK, October 2023.
-
Managing editor of the International
Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL).
- (Senior) program committee member and reviewer of several
leading conferences such as ECDL/TPDL, JCDL, ECIR, ICTIR, CHIIR,
CIKM and SIGIR.
- Reviewer for several journals such as ACM Transactions on
Information Systems (TOIS), Elsevier Information Systems, Elsevier
Information Processing & Management (IP&M), The Journal of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST),
The Information Retrieval Journal (Springer), The Computer Journal,
PLOS ONE, Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier), Scientometrics
(Springer) and The International Journal on Digital Libraries
(Springer).
- Co-organiser or Program Chair:
- Autumn School for Information
Retrieval and Foraging (ASIRF),
Schloß
Dagstuhl in Germany. (Review
of ASIRF 2017 in BCS Informer.)
- German Information Retrieval workshop
series held at LWDA
(formerly LWA).
- Bibliometrics and Information
Retrieval (BIR) workshop series run
at past ECIRs (and helped to organise the BIRNDL 'spin-off' at
JCDL/SIGIR).
- BCS-IRSG Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA): FDIA
2017 in Barcelona, Spain, FDIA
2018 in Tianjin, China, FDIA 2019 in
Milan, Italy, FDIA 2022 in Lisbon,
Portugal and FDIA 2023 in Vienna, Austria.
- BCS
Search Solutions, which includes talks by influential industry
leaders.
- Treasurer and a member of the steering committee of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group.
- I was member of the steering
committee of the Special Interest Group on
Information Retrieval of the German
Computing Society.
- Steering committee member of ACM ICTIR and ACM CIKM.
- Editorial board member of the
Datenbank
Spektrum (Springer), the official journal of the German Information
Retrieval resp. Database special interest groups.
CV
Trivia