I'm an Information Retrieval researcher based in Canberra, Australia. Since July 2008 I've worked at the Funnelback enterprise search company in the role of Chief Scientist.
My interests lie in the areas of Enterprise and Web Search. I am interested in search evaluation in realistic contexts, distributed search techniques, retrieval through textual annotations, enterprise/intranet search, query suggestion and improvement, improvement of search through exploitation of context, personal search and search efficiency.
I am a member of the editorial board for the Information Retrieval journal (INRT). and hold an adjunct professorship in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University where I continue to advise PhD and other research students.
Between 1998 and 2008 I was a research scientist
at CSIRO. From 1996 to 2003 I was a
coordinator of VLC and Web tracks in the
annual Text Retrieval Conference
(TREC). The activities of these tracks are summarised in
I love the game of Ultimate (yes, with a flying disk AKA frisbee) but haven't had the chance to play for a while. In recent years I've become fond of cycling and recently bought a nice carbon-fibre bike. Canberra is an amazingly good place for cycling with good weather and hundreds of kilometres of dedicated cycle paths both on and off road. Riding around the lakes and forests at weekends and on summer evenings is very pleasant.