Justin Zobel

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Justin Zobel is an Australian computer scientist working in information retrieval, search engine technology, and research evaluation. He is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and serves as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Graduate & International Research.[1][2]

Education and early career

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Zobel received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Melbourne in 1991. His doctoral research was in type theory for logic programming.[3] Following his Ph.D., he held academic appointments at RMIT University, where he was part of the team that developed an open-source search engines, MG. His work at RMIT contributed to the development of scalable methods for indexing and searching large text collections.[4]

Career

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Zobel later returned to the University of Melbourne, where he was appointed professor and subsequently Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor.[5] He has served in administrative roles including Head of the School of Computing and Information Systems and currently as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Graduate & International Research.[6] His has published books Writing for Computer Science[7] and How to Write a Better Thesis, co-authored with David Evans and Paul Gruba. [citation needed]

Research

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Zobel's research has primarily focused on information retrieval, text indexing, search engine architecture, and data compression. He has contributed to the development of efficient, scalable algorithms for managing and searching large-scale textual data. He has collaborated with Alistair Moffat and others on inverted indexes, similarity measures, and compression techniques.[8][9] He has worked on MG and later Zettair, text retrieval systems designed for high performance on modest hardware.[citation needed] He has also explored self-indexing, dynamic tries, and burst tries as innovative approaches to managing large string datasets.[10]

Awards and honours

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Zobel was elected a Fellow of the ACM in 2025 and a Fellow of CORE (the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia) in the same year. In 2022, he was inducted into the SIGIR Academy.[11] He is also a recipient of the CORE Distinguished Service Award (2016) for his sustained contributions to computing research in Australasia.[12]

Selected publications

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  • Zobel, J. (2014). Writing for Computer Science (3rd ed.). Springer. ISBN 9781447166397.
  • Evans, D., Gruba, P., & Zobel, J. (2011). How to Write a Better Thesis (3rd ed.). Springer. ISBN 9783319042855.
  • Zobel, J., & Moffat, A. (2006). "Inverted files for text search engines." ACM Computing Surveys, 38(2), Article 6.
  • Moffat, A., & Zobel, J. (1996). "Self-indexing inverted files for fast text retrieval." ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 14(4), 349–379.
  • Lester, N., Moffat, A., & Zobel, J. (2005). "Fast on-line index construction by geometric partitioning." Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 776–783.
  • Webber, W., Moffat, A., & Zobel, J. (2010). "A similarity measure for indefinite rankings." ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 28(4), Article 20.

References

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  1. ^ "Justin Zobel". The University of Melbourne.
  2. ^ Cashin, Kasey (27 June 2023). "Professor Justin Zobel". University of Melbourne.
  3. ^ Coelho, Jorge; Florido, Mário (2003). "Type-Based XML Processing in Logic Programming". Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. 2562: 273–285. doi:10.1007/3-540-36388-2_19.
  4. ^ "Justin Zobel". IEEE Xplore.
  5. ^ Bruin, Tyler (24 November 2023). "University of Melbourne renews joint PhD program with Forschungszentrum Jülich". University of Melbourne.
  6. ^ "Justin Zobel". speakers.acm.org.
  7. ^ "Justin Zobel" (PDF). The Conversation.
  8. ^ Zobel, Justin; Moffat, Alistair; Wilkinson, Ross; Sacks-Davis, Ron (1 May 1995). "Efficient retrieval of partial documents". Information Processing & Management. pp. 361–377. doi:10.1016/0306-4573(94)00052-5.
  9. ^ "Professor Justin Zobel - ACGR". ACGR. 11 July 2024.
  10. ^ Zobel, Justin (31 May 2016). "The history of computing is both evolution and revolution". The Conversation.
  11. ^ "SIGIR 2014". sigir.org.
  12. ^ "Professor Justin Zobel". awards.acm.org.