David Hawking

David Hawking

I'm an Information Retrieval researcher. Between 1998 and 2008 I was a research scientist at CSIRO. In July 2008 I took up a full-time position at the Funnelback enterprise search company in the role of Chief Scientist. I am an official Visitor in the CSIRO ICT Centre.

My interests lie in the areas of enterprise and Web Search. I am particularly interested in search evaluation in realistic contexts, distributed search techniques, enterprise/intranet search, 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).

I hold an Adjunct professorship in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University and continue to supervise PhD students at both ANU and the University of Sydney:

PhD graduates include: I'm on the Scientific Board of the Information Retrieval Facility in Vienna. This is a non-profit research institute providing large scale data and facilities to promote information retrieval research.

From 1996-2003 I was a coordinator of VLC and Web tracks in the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC).  The activities of these tracks are summarised in Chapter 9 of the MIT Press book (Ellen M. Voorhees and Donna K. Harman (Ed.s), TREC - Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval, Search for ISBN 0262220733 to find it on the Web.)

I was a Program Chair of ACM SIGIR in 2003 and again in 2006.  I hold an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel and was awarded the Chris Wallace prize for Computer Science at the Australasian Computer Science Week 2005.

If you'd like all the gory details, here's a not very up-to-date cv.

Publications

Pictures


Last modified: 25 May 2009.
email: dave att acm dott org