Computing and Information Systems

Professor Alistair Moffat

Research Interests

• Data structures and algorithms for compression
• Data structures and algorithms for string search
• Information retrieval and web search

Personal webpage:

http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~alistair/

Biography

Alistair Moffat completed a BSc(Honors) and PhD in 1979 and 1986 respectively, both at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Since then he has been a member of the academic staff at the University of Melbourne, where he holds an appointment as Professor of Computer Science (2002). Alistair was Head of the University's Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering for a five-year term from 2007 to 2011, and Associate Dean (Curriculum) in the Melbourne School of Engineering during the period 2007-2009.

Alistair has extensive research interests in the areas of text and index compression, source coding methods, and information retrieval. He is an author of three books (Managing Gigabytes, 1994 and 1999; Compression and Coding Algorithms, 2002; and Programming, Problem Solving and Abstraction with C, 2003); and of more than 150 refereed technical papers. Alistair has also served roles as Chair and Program Chair of a range of conferences, and as an Associate Editor of research journals, including Journal of Information Retrieval, and ACM Transactions on Information Systems.

Alistair was awarded a Australian Carrick Citation for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in the first round of these awards in 2006, and has also been recognized within the University for his teaching contributions. In 2010, he received a Teaching Award from the Melbourne School of Engineering for excellence in teaching, and in recognition of his role as principal architect of the School of Engineering's response to the Melbourne Model changes undertaken between 2006 and 2009.

Alistair has served a term on the ARC College of Experts (2003-2005); is a member of the 2012 New Zealand PBRF Panel; and has been a member of a wide range of review and accreditation committees, both internal and external to the University.

Recent Publications

1. Pohl, S; Moffat, A; Zobel, J; Efficient Extended Boolean Retrieval. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2012, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 1014-1024.
2. Allan, J; Croft, B; Moffat, A; Sanderson, M; Frontiers, Challenges, and Opportunities for Information Retrieval: Report from SWIRL 2012. SIGIR Forum, 2012, Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 2-32.
3. Callan, J; Moffat, A; Panel on use of proprietary data. SIGIR Forum, 2012, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 10-18.
4. Moffat, A; Scholer, F; Thomas, P; Models and Metrics: IR Evaluation as a User Process. Proceedings of the 17th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, 17th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, pp. 47-54.
5. Graham, Y; Baldwin, T; Harwood, A; Moffat, A; Zobel, J; Measurement of Progress in Machine Translation. Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2012, The Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop 2012, pp. 70-78.
6. Huston, S; Moffat, A; Croft, W; Efficient indexing of repeated n-grams. Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining 2011, 4th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining 2011, pp. 127-136.
7. Zobel, J; Webber, W; Sanderson, M; Moffat, A; Principles for robust evaluation infrastructure. International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings, 2011 Workshop on Data infrastructurEs for Supporting Information Retrieval Evaluation, DESIRE'11, in Conjunction with the 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2011, pp. 51-58.
8. Webber, W; Moffat, A; Zobel, J; A similarity measure for indefinite rankings. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2010, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 20:01-20:38.
9. Zhang, Y; Park, L; Moffat, A; Click-based evidence for decaying weight distributions in search effectiveness metrics. Information Retrieval, 2010, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 46-69.
10. Culpepper, J; Moffat, A; Efficient set intersection for inverted indexing. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2010, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 1-25.
11. Anh, V; Moffat, A; Index compression using 64-bit words. Software-Practice and Experience, 2010, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 131-147.
12. Ravana, S; Moffat, A; Estimating system effectiveness scores with incomplete evidence. Proceedings of the 15th Australasian Document Computing Symposium 2010, 15th Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS 2010), pp. 1-8.
13. Pohl, S; Zobel, J; Moffat, A; Extended Boolean Retrieval for Systematic Biomedical Reviews. Proceedings of the 33rd Australasian Computer Science Conference 2010, 33rd Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC 2010), pp. 117-125.
14. Ravana, S; Moffat, A; Score Estimation, Incomplete Judgments, and Significance Testing in IR Evaluation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2010, pp. 97-109.
15. Webber, W; Moffat, A; Zobel, J; The effect of pooling and evaluation depth on metric stability. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access, 3rd International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access (EVIA 2010), pp. 7-15.

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