J. Shane Culpepper


J. Shane Culpepper


Overview

I am a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at The University of Queensland in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Research

I am a researcher in the area of Information Retrieval. My current research focuses on developing new approaches to effectively and efficiently search massive data collections, and understanding how to measure the quality of the answers found. Research interests include efficient and scalable algorithm design, machine learning in information retrieval, and system evaluation.

See my research overview and publications pages for more information.

In 2025, Johanne Trippas and I are co-organising the Fourth Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (SWIRL) where we will discuss the future of IR research. Our primary goal is to revise the IR research manifesto developed at SWIRL3. A preprint of our findings will be made available shortly after the workshop concludes.

Potential Students and Postdocs

If you are interested in the work we do and wish to pursue a research career, please read the information included on my Phd and Postdoc recruiting page to find out more about current opportunites and selection criteria.

I am interested in taking on an Honours student in 2025 to work on LLMs for Search, Search Algorithms, Data Structures for Search, or Data Compression. An Honours scholarship may be available for suitably qualifed students working in my group. Honours students routinely qualify for PhD scholarships (APA, RTSP, etc) after completing an Honours degree in my group. So, if you're interested in learning more about this research opportunity, please contact me by email so that we can find a time to meet and discuss it further.

Current PhD Students

  1. Tharita Tipdecho
  2. Feng Luo
  3. Daomin Ji
  4. Tingting Wang
  5. Hai Lan
  6. Daomin Ji

Past PhD Students

  1. Oleg Zendel (Completed in 2024)
  2. Rodger Benham (Completed in 2023)
  3. Binsheng Liu (Completed 2022)
  4. Luke Gallagher (Completed 2021)
  5. Shixun Huang (Completed 2021)
  6. Hui Luo (Completed 2021)
  7. Bhagya Wickramasinghe (Completed 2020)
  8. Joel Mackenzie (completed PhD in 2020)
  9. Sheng Wang (completed PhD in 2019)
  10. Tadele Tedla Damessie (completed PhD in 2019)
  11. Xiaolu Lu (completed PhD in 2018)
  12. Farhana Murtaza Choudhury (completed PhD in 2017)
  13. Chris Hoobin (Completed 2015)
  14. Gaya Jayasinghe (completed PhD in 2014)
  15. Matthias Petri (completed PhD in 2013)

Biography

I completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2008 under the venerable Alistair Moffat. I currently reside in lovely Melbourne, Australia. Before entering academia, I spent several years in various technical roles in industry. For more details, refer to my curriculum vitae which is probably a little out of date at this point.



Last Update: 22 Feb 2022