Guido Zuccon

Professor Guido Zuccon is a Professorial Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School, the AI DIrector for the Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC), an Affiliate Professor at the UQ Centre for Health Services Research, Faculty of Medicine, and an Honorary Reader at Strathclyde University (UK). He leads the Information Engineering Lab (ielab), a research team working in Information Retrieval and Health Data Science. He was an ARC DECRA Fellow (2018-2020).

Guido's main research interests are Information Retrieval, Health Search, Formal Models of Search and Search Interaction, and Health Data Science. He has successfully attracted funding from the ARC via an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellowship and an ARC Discoverty Project. His research has also been funded by Google (Google Research Awards program), Grain Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), Microsoft (Microsoft Azure for Research Award), the CSIRO (research gifts and PhD Students Top-up scholarships), the Australian Academy of Science (FASIC program), the European Science Foundation, and Neusoft Corporation.

Guido has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles at conferences and in journals, in information retrieval and health informatics; of these more than 30 are ranked in the top 10% of his filed (field weighted average) and more than 10 are ranked in the top 1%. He has won best papers award at AIRS 2017 (“Automatic Query Generation from Legal Texts for Case Law Retrieval”), CLEF 2016 (“Assessors agreement: A case study across assessor type, payment levels, query variations and relevance dimensions”), ALTA 2015 (“Analysis of Word Embeddings and Sequence Features for Clinical Information Extraction”), and ECIR 2012 (“Top-k retrieval using facility location analysis”). His research on people using search engines to seek health advice on the web has been widely disseminated by the media (190+ national and international newspaper articles, 10+ TV and radio interviews in 2015; see the media page coverage for that project). Guido is the Consumer Health Search task leader for the CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab, since 2014. He is one of the TREC 2019 Decision Track organisers: this is an international evaluation effort in Information Retrieval that aims to investigate how people use search engines to make decisions (with a focus in 2019 on consumer health search). Guido has provided scientific tutorials to other researchers in his field at ACM SIGIR 2015 and 2018, ACM CIKM 2015, ACM ICTIR 2016, RUSSIR 2018, WSDM 2019.

Guido has reviewed for top journals and conferences in his field, including ACM TOIS, FnTIR, JASIST, IRJ, ACM TIST, ACM TWEB, IP&M, ACM SIGIR,ACM CIKM, ACM ICTIR, ACM WSDM, WWW, ECIR, ACM SIG-PODS. He was awarded the Best Reviewer Award at ECIR 2014. He has served as general chair, program chair, workshop chair and publicity chair for conferences in his research field, including ADCS (either PC Chair or General Chair in 2013, 2014, 2017), AIRS 2015 (General Chair), ECIR 2015 (Workshop Chair) and WSDM 2019 (publicity chair). Dr Zuccon is the Information co-Director for ACM SIGIR and was one of the recognised IR leaders invited to participate to the 3rd Strategic Workshop in Information Retrieval (SWIRL III, 2018).

Before joining the University of Queensland, Guido was a Lecturer (2014-2017) and Senior Lecturer (2017-2018) at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Australian E-Health Research Centre (AEHRC), CSIRO (2011-2014), Australia. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Glasgow, UK (2012), focusing on Formal Models of Information Retrieval based on Quantum Theory, and a M.Comp.Eng. summa cum laude at the University of Padova, Italy (2007).