Colin (Wilkie) McLellan

I am currently a PhD Candidate at the Universtiy of Glasgow, Scotland. I graduated from UoG with an MSci (Hons 1) in Computing Science in 2013 whilst also working as an RA in the School of Computing Science. Following my RA position in the school, I gained sponsorhip on an IAA to take the research performed in my time as an RA to industry. I worked at Signal Media for 6 months as a Data Scientist. I have now returned to UoG and am undertaking my PhD in Computing Science supervised by Dr. Leif Azzopardi, focusing on the use of Retrievavbility theory to identify and evaluate bias in search.

Research Interests

My current research interests centres around the idea of bias in search. It has long been known that bias is present in search, where documents are favoured by retrieval systems due to features of the document that are not related to relevance. Until recently this has been very difficult to evaluate on any level. However, with the introduction of Retrievability by Azzopardi and Vinay in 2008, a measure which allows bias to be quantified exists. Using retrievability and aspects of socio-political science we can evaluate how bias a system is, allowing us then to identify the sources of this bias. Another facet of my research stems from the use of the Reverted Index, developed by Jeremy Pickens, for tasks such as Query Expansion and Clustering.

Publications

Query Length, Retrievability Bias and Performance
Wilkie, C., and Azzopardi, L. Proceedings of the 24th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2015.
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A Retrievability Analysis: Exploring the Relationship Between Retrieval Bias and Retrieval Performance
Wilkie, C., and Azzopardi, L., Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2014.
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Best and Fairest: An Empirical Analysis of Retrieval System Bias
Wilkie, C., and Azzopardi, L., Proceedings of the BCS-IRSG 36th European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2014.
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Efficiently Estimating Retrievability Bias
Wilkie, C. and Azzopardi, L., Proceedings of the BCS-IRSG 35th European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2014.
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Page Retrievability Calculator
Azzopardi, L., English, R., Wilkie, C. and Maxwell, D., Proceedings of the BCS-IRSG 35th European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2014.
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Relating Retrievability, Performance and Length
C., Wilkie, L., AzzopardiProceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2013.
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An initial investigation on the relationship between usage and findability
C., Wilkie, L., Azzopardi, Proceedings of the BCS-IRSG 35th European Conference in Information Retrieval, 2013.
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Towards measures and models of findability
L Azzopardi, C Wilkie, T Russell-RoseACM SIGIR Workshop on Modelling User Behaviour for Evaluation, 2013.
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Contact Me

Office: SAWB 322
Email: c.wilkie.3@research.gla.ac.uk
Twitter: @kojayboy
Skype: kojayboy