Dr. Leif Azzopardi
I am now a Chancellor's Fellow within the Departement of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, where I lead the Interactive Information Retrieval group and my new page is at: https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/azzopardileifdr/.
I am also an honorary lecturer within the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow where I supervise PhD students and support the Web Application Development Courses. Prior to this, I was a Senior Lecturer within the School and a member of the Information Retrieval group.
I work on:
modelling information access and retrieval problems to understand how and why people search for information,
how we can improve search systems,
-
and how such systems shape and influence our lives.
This brings in a wide range of research including theoretical research on the design and modelling of information access systems, empirical lab based research, simulation of user interaction and the development of suitable methods for evaluating information access and retrieval systems.
Currently, I am particularly interested in describing, predicting and explaining the interaction between users and systems using theory from economics. Often this requires large scale simulations of the interactions between users and systems and the mining of query and interactions logs to formulate statistical and functional relationships between interaction, performance and effort. Also, I am working towards relating how the cognitive load, physical effort and temporal costs affect the interaction of users and the performance that they achieve through search systems.
To learn more about developing in Python Django, we host online book called How to Tango with Django at www.tangowithdjango.com. The site has received over 1.5 million visitors since its release in October, 2013. The code to the book and the application that you create is available via my GitHub repository.
Biography
Dr. Leif Azzopardi is a Chancellor's Fellow within the Departement of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, see: https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/azzopardileifdr/. He also holds an honorary Associate Professorship at the Queensland University of Technology and a honorary Lectureship within the School of Computing Science. He currently supervises several PhD, MSc and Honours Students on projects ranging from traditional formal models based research and applications of Information Retrieval to extreme models, methods and applications (such as those based on Quantum Theory or Transportation Planning). His latest research focus on using Economic Theory to model the interaction between users and information retrieval systems.Central to his research is the theoretical development of statistical language models for Information Retrieval, where his research interests include:
- Models for the retrieval of documents, sentences, experts and other information objects
- Probabilistic models of user interaction and the simulation of users for evaluation
- Microeconomic models of information interaction, specifically how cognitive load and effort affect interaction and performance with search systems
- Methods for text and data mining of large scale/big data collections
- Methods which assess the impact of search technology on society in application areas such as, search engine bias and the accessibility of E-Government information
Previously, Dr. Leif Azzopardi was a Senior Lecturer within the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group and a full time academic member of staff within the School of Computing Science, at the University of Glasgow from 2007-20016. Dr Azzopardi was a Post Doctoral Researcher within iLab at the University of Strathclyde in 2006 under the direction of Prof. Fabio Crestani and Prof. Ian Ruthven, and ILPS at the University of Amsterdam in 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Maarten de Rijke. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Paisley in 2005, where he was supervised by Prof. Mark Girolami, Prof. Malcolm Crowe and Prof. Keith van Rijsbergen. Prior to this he received First Class Honours Degree in Information Science from the University of Newcastle, Australia, 2001. He is a lifetime member of the ACM and a member of the BCS.
Contact Information
Tango With Django
Check out our online book on web application development in Python/Django
Google Tech Talk
Check out my work on economics in IR:
PuppyIR
The Open Source PuppyIR Framework for developing Interactive Information Retrieval Services for Children (and Adults).
