About Me
Womin djeka! This is my personal—not an official RMIT—website. I’m a Senior Lecturer and DECRA Fellow at RMIT University (School of Computing Technologies), deputy director of the Research Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics (CIDDA), an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a research collaborator of RMIT FactLab.
My main research interests are Information Retrieval (IR), Text Analytics, and Data Science. I currently work on evaluation of information access systems and interactive information retrieval.
In my free time, I teach Capoeira at the Associação de Capoeira Descendente do Pantera (ACDP) –where I am also known as Contramestre Camaleão– and play samba with Wombatuque.
- Information Retrieval
- Text Analytics
- Data Science
PhD in Computer Science, 2014
UNED (Madrid, Spain)
Affiliations
Senior Lecturer and DECRA Fellow, School of Computing Technologies
Deputy Director, Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics
Associate Investigator, Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society
Publications
Supervision
Scholarship Opportunities
BITS-RMIT (India-Australia) PhD Research Partnership
Transform your future with a transnational joint PhD from two leading universities. Attractive scholarships available including funded travel to Melbourne, Australian stipend and overseas health cover.
Title. Enhancing computing education for the visually impaired using machine-generated code summaries (BITSRMIT100090)
Project Description. Visually impaired (VI) persons use screen readers that verbalise the text on a computer screen line-by-line. While a sighted developer can comprehend program code by glancing at pieces of code quickly, it is difficult for a VI developer to comprehend code by going line by line. Thus, the aim is to develop an AI-based assistive system helping to improve (Python) code comprehension for the VI developer. Sub-tasks: 1) develop a pseudocode generator providing a natural language description of the source code, 2) develop an AI-based code summarizer generating a compact summary improving the code comprehension, and finally 3) design and develop a Visual Studio code plug-in implementing the above-mentioned models. Experiments: For source code summary generation, we aim to use a multi-modal approach consisting of source code analysis, pseudocode analysis, and feedback quantification. We will employ a forest of abstract syntax trees to generate summaries. The pseudocode will be used to extract long-distance semantics, while feedback will extract lexical features from the text. We will validate our approach against human evaluation and statistical analysis. We will deploy the designed plug-in for real-world Python teaching-learning setups for the VI students. We will compare the code comprehension and programming abilities of VI students using our tool (treatment) and without using our tool (control group).
BITS Supervisors. Dr. Swati Agarwal, Dr. Swaroop Joshi
RMIT Supervisors. Dr Damiano Spina, Dr. Johanne R. Trippas
PhD Scholarship in Automated Decision-Making and Information Retrieval
Opportunity to join the Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) work on developing new approaches to fairness, actionable explainability or socially considerate evaluation of Automated Decision-Making in search, conversational, recommender, or other information access systems.
Current PhD Students
- Co-supervision of PhD candidate Kaixin Ji, working on Measuring and Quantifying Bias and Engagement in Interactive Information Access (together with Flora D. Salim, Falk Scholer, and Danula Hettiachchi).
- Co-supervision of PhD candidate Rahmad Mahendra, working on Semantic Matching for Clinical Trial Retrieval (together with Karin Verspoor and Lawrence Cavedon).
- Co-supervision of PhD candidate Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal, working on Fairness-Aware Question Answering for Intelligent Assistants (together with Falk Scholer and W. Bruce Croft).
- Co-supervision of PhD candidate Manuel Steiner, working on Influences of Backstories on Queries with Multiple Intents in Task-Based Specialized Information Retrieval (together with Lawrence Cavedon and Falk Scholer).
Former PhD Students
Dr. Ameer Albahem, Evaluating Dynamic Search Systems for Interactive Complex Tasks (co-supervised with Lawrence Cavedon and Falk Scholer).
Dr. Johanne R. Trippas, Spoken conversational search: audio-only interactive information retrieval (co-supervised with Lawrence Cavedon and Mark Sanderson).
Former Master and Honours Students
- Reham Abdullah Altalhi, Search Results Fairness based on Analytical Hierarchy Process, RMIT University, 2022.
- Binh Chon Nut Le, Investigating Algorithmic Bias via Crowdsourcing, RMIT University, 2020. [Paper]
- Xinhuan Duan, Two-Step Classification for Profiling Fake News Spreaders on Twitter, RMIT University, 2020. [Paper]
- Shubhdeep Singh, Spoken DialogWOZ : A Tool to PerformWizard of Oz Experiments in Speech-Only Question Answering Scenarios, RMIT University, 2020.
- Assunta Cerone, Watch ’n’ Check: Towards a Social Media Monitoring Tool to Assist Fact-Checking Experts, Politecnico di Torino, 2020. [Paper]
- Mazhar Morshed, Missing Attribute Imputation through Clustering in New Item Cold Start Job Recommendation, RMIT University, 2017.
- Phanomsinh Homsombath, Applying Phonetic Matching to Spoken Document Retrieval, RMIT University, 2015.
