Biography

Dr. Leif Azzopardi is a 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. 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 Microeconomic 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 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 was also the past Chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (2006-2008) and currently sits on the committee. He is a lifetime member of the ACM and a member of the BCS and IEEE.