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), a member of the Research Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics (CIDDA), and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

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 Estagiário Camaleão– and play samba with Wombatuque.

I acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands I live, work, teach, and learn. I respectfully acknowledge their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. I also acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia.
Interests
  • Information Retrieval
  • Text Analytics
  • Data Science
Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2014

    UNED (Madrid, Spain)

Affiliations

rmit
RMIT University

Senior Lecturer, School of Computing Technologies

cidda
RMIT CIDDA

DECRA Fellow, Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics

adms-fill
ADM+S

Associate Investigator, Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society

Publications

Ameer Albahem, Damiano Spina, Falk Scholer, Lawrence Cavedon (2021). Component-Based Analysis of Dynamic Search Performance. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst..

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Lauren L. Saling, Devi Mallal, Falk Scholer, Russell Skelton, Damiano Spina (2021). No one is immune to misinformation: An investigation of misinformation sharing by subscribers to a fact-checking newsletter. PLOS ONE.

PDF Cite Dataset DOI

Johanne R. Trippas, Damiano Spina, Mark Sanderson, Lawrence Cavedon (2021). Accessing Media Via an Audio-only Communication Channel: A Log Analysis. CUI'21.

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Johannes Kiesel, Damiano Spina, Henning Wachsmuth, Benno Stein (2021). The Meant, the Said, and the Understood: Conversational Argument Search and Cognitive Biases. CUI'21.

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Recent Tweets

Supervision

Current PhD Students

Former PhD Students

Former Master and Honour Students

  • Binh Chon Nut Le, Investigating Algorithmic Bias via Crowdsourcing, RMIT University, 2020.
  • 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.

Academic Services

Awards

RMIT University
The RMIT Research Awards and Prizes focus on research excellence and research impact. It is through these research contributions that RMIT continues to bridge the gap between research and impact, benefitting those beyond the academic community. The research awards and prizes acknowledge the accomplishments of individual researchers, research teams, research leaders, supervisors, and HDR candidates.
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Australian Research Council
Fair and Transparent Information Access in Spoken Conversational Assistants. This project aims to investigate how rich information needed to answer complex questions can be delivered via a speech-only communication channel. Using laboratory user studies, where users can interact with a smart speaker to ask for information about controversial or multi-perspective topics, the project expects to advance knowledge on how to expose pertinent information without creating or reinforcing biases. Expected outcomes include novel presentation strategies to access rich information via audio in a fair manner. This should significantly benefit the visually impaired and low-literacy communities by enhancing their access to topics with multiple point of views, which would impact decision making such as who to vote for in elections.
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ECIR 2020
La Barbera D., Roitero K., Demartini G., Mizzaro S., Spina D. (2020) Crowdsourcing Truthfulness: The Impact of Judgment Scale and Assessor Bias. In: Jose J. et al. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12036. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45442-5_26
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ECIR 2019
Albahem A., Spina D., Scholer F., Cavedon L. (2019) Meta-evaluation of Dynamic Search: How Do Metrics Capture Topical Relevance, Diversity and User Effort?. In: Azzopardi L., Stein B., Fuhr N., Mayr P., Hauff C., Hiemstra D. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11437. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15712-8_39
See certificate
Information Processing & Management
Top Reviewer Award
Information Processing & Management Dec 2018
In recognition of the review made for the Elsevier’s international journal Information Processing & Management (IP&M), based on number of reviews, quality of reviews, and timeliness of responses.
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Art

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