Search Systems Group

Research Overview

The velocity of digital information being produced everyday continues to outpace efficient storage and processing capacities. The volume of data that must be manipulated presents unique challenges in algorithm design, and makes efficiently computing statistics, finding interesting patterns, or answering queries difficult in many practical settings. The Search Systems Group focuses on developing new search, processing and storage models for complex data representations. We are also interested in understanding how to measure the quality of results returned in a variety of search and data analytics scenarios, and ensure that the users' information needs are satisfied.

Many computational domains that are heavily reliant on the processing of massive data collections, such as information retrieval, question answering, dialog search, natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, data science, bioinformatics, and data streams benefit from this line of research.

Research Topics

• Information Retrieval
• Measuring Search Quality
• Machine Learning in Search
• Scalable Algorithm Design
• Data Compression
• String Processing and Indexing
• Stream Processing Algorithms

Grants

ARC Discovery Grant DP220101434: Z. Bao, J. S. Culpepper, T. Sellis, and G. Cong: ``Advancing Analytical Query Processing with Urban Trajectory Data.'' 2022-2024 ($364,295).

Google Faculty Research Award: J. S. Culpepper: 2019 ($68,267 USD).

Amazon Research Award: J. S. Culpepper: 2019 ($100,000 USD).

ARC Discovery Grant DP190101113: F. Scholer, A. Moffat, J. S. Culpepper, and J. Callan: ``Approaches to Interactive Sessional Search.'' 2019-2021 ($380,000).

RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship : J. S. Culpepper 2017-2022 ($598,676).

2017H1 Mozilla Research Grant : J. S. Culpepper: ``Efficient and Effective Multi-Stage Retrieval in Rust.'' 2017 ($50,000 USD).

ARC Discovery Grant DP170102231: T. Sellis, J. S. Culpepper, C. L. A. Clarke, and J. Lin: ``Trajectory Data Processing - Spatial Computing meets Information Retrieval.'' 2017-2019 ($416,000).

ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award DE140100275: J. S. Culpepper: ``Beyond keyword search for ranked document retrieval.'' 2014-2016 ($392,979) + ($150,000 RMIT Support).

ARC Discovery Grant DP140101587: J. S. Culpepper, T. Sellis, N. Mamoulis, and C. S. Jensen: ``Efficient and effective ad-hoc retrieval using structured and unstructured geospatial information.'' 2014-2016 ($422,000) + ($75,000 RMIT Support).

ARC Discovery Grant DP110101743: A. Moffat, A. Wirth, J. S. Culpepper, and A. Turpin: ``Efficient and effective algorithms for searching strings in secondary storage.'' 2011-2013 ($360,000).

RMIT Seed Grant: J. S. Culpepper: ``Novel ranking algorithms for unrestricted text indexing.'' 2010 ($20,000).

Publications