Overview
Background
I am currently a lecturer at the University of Queensland, where I conduct research in the field of Information Retrieval. My research focuses on efficient and effective representations for large-scale search engines, including indexing, compression, and retrieval. I am also interested in understanding how to measure improvements in the end-to-end search pipeline, including system-oriented effectiveness measurements and user behaviour analysis. I have a broad interest in empirical experimentation, operating systems, data structures, and algorithms.
Previous Positions
- From February 2020 to January 2022 I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on an ARC discovery project with Professor Alistair Moffat at the University of Melbourne.
- I completed my PhD at RMIT University under the guidance of Professor J. Shane Culpepper and Professor Falk Scholer.
Availability
- Dr Joel Mackenzie is:
- Available for supervision
- Media expert
Fields of research
Research interests
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Efficient Data Structures and Algorithms
Inverted Indexes, Compression, Query Processing, Distributed Search, Parallel Processing, Data structures, Algorithms, Bioinformatics, Strings
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Evaluating Search Systems
Empirical Experimentation, Metrics, Data Visualization, User Behaviour
Works
Search Professor Joel Mackenzie’s works on UQ eSpace
2025
Conference Publication
A flexible resource for top-weighted comparisons between sets and rankings
Moffat, Alistair, Mackenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio and Petri, Matthias (2025). A flexible resource for top-weighted comparisons between sets and rankings. 48th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR 2025), Padua, Italy, 13-18 July 2025. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3726302.3730306
2025
Conference Publication
Efficient in-memory inverted indexes: theory and practice
Mackenzie, Joel, MacAvaney, Sean, Mallia, Antonio and Siedlaczek, Michał (2025). Efficient in-memory inverted indexes: theory and practice. 48th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR 2025), Padua, Italy, 13-18 July 2025. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3726302.3731688
2025
Conference Publication
Approximate Bag-of-Words Top-k Corpus Graphs
Dunn, Lachlan, Gallagher, Luke and Mackenzie, Joel (2025). Approximate Bag-of-Words Top-k Corpus Graphs. 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2025, Lucca, Italy, 6–10 April 2025. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-88714-7_15
2025
Conference Publication
Examining the Impact of Transcript Variation on Podcast Search and Re-ranking
Mansour, Watheq, Culpepper, J. Shane and Mackenzie, Joel (2025). Examining the Impact of Transcript Variation on Podcast Search and Re-ranking. 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2025, Lucca, Italy, 6–10 April 2025. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-88714-7_9
2025
Conference Publication
Batched k-mer lookup on the Spectral Burrows-Wheeler Transform
Alanko, Jarno N., Biagi, Elena, Mackenzie, Joel and Puglisi, Simon J. (2025). Batched k-mer lookup on the Spectral Burrows-Wheeler Transform. SIAM Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX25), New Orleans, United States, 12-13 January 2025. Philadelphia, PA, United States: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Publications. doi: 10.1137/1.9781611978339.8
2024
Conference Publication
Rank-biased quality measurement for sets and rankings
Moffat, Alistair, Mackenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio and Petri, Matthias (2024). Rank-biased quality measurement for sets and rankings. 2024 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (SIGIR-AP ’24), Tokyo, Japan, 9-12 December 2024. New York, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3673791.3698405
2024
Conference Publication
Re-evaluating the command-and-control paradigm in conversational search interactions
Trippas, Johanne R., Gallagher, Luke and Mackenzie, Joel (2024). Re-evaluating the command-and-control paradigm in conversational search interactions. 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Boise, ID, United States, 21-25 October 2024. New York, United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3627673.3679588
2024
Conference Publication
ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2024: The Third Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval
Fröbe, Maik, Mackenzie, Joel, Mitra, Bhaskar, Nardini, Franco Maria and Potthast, Martin (2024). ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2024: The Third Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval. SIGIR '24, Washington, DC, United States, 14 - 18 July 2024. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3626772.3657994
2024
Conference Publication
What do users really ask large language models? An initial log analysis of Google Bard interactions in the wild
Trippas, Johanne R., Al Lawati, Sara Fahad Dawood, Mackenzie, Joel and Gallagher, Luke (2024). What do users really ask large language models? An initial log analysis of Google Bard interactions in the wild. SIGIR '24: 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Washington, DC, United States, 14-18 July 2024. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3626772.3657914
2024
Conference Publication
Revisiting document expansion and filtering for effective first-stage retrieval
Mansour, Watheq, Zhuang, Shengyao, Zuccon, Guido and Mackenzie, Joel (2024). Revisiting document expansion and filtering for effective first-stage retrieval. SIGIR '24, Washington, DC, United States, 14-18 July 2024. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3626772.3657850
2024
Journal Article
How much freedom does an effectiveness metric really have?
Moffat, Alistair and Mackenzie, Joel (2024). How much freedom does an effectiveness metric really have?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 75 (6), 686-703. doi: 10.1002/asi.24874
2023
Conference Publication
Lossy compression options for dense index retention
Mackenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2023). Lossy compression options for dense index retention. 1st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region (SIGIR-AP), Beijing, Peoples Republic of China, 26-28 November 2023. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3624918.3625316
2023
Conference Publication
Exploring the representation power of SPLADE models
Mackenzie, Joel, Zhuang, Shengyao and Zuccon, Guido (2023). Exploring the representation power of SPLADE models. ICTIR '23: The 2023 ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval, Taipei, Taiwan, 23 July 2023. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3578337.3605129
2023
Conference Publication
ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2023: The Second Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval
Bruch, Sebastian, Mackenzie, Joel, Maistro, Maria and Nardini, Franco Maria (2023). ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2023: The Second Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information Retrieval. 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Taipei, Taiwan, 23-27 July 2023. New York, NY, United States: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3539618.3591922
2023
Conference Publication
Profiling and visualizing dynamic pruning algorithms
Li, Zhixuan and Mackenzie, Joel (2023). Profiling and visualizing dynamic pruning algorithms. SIGIR 2023 - the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Taipei, Taiwan, 23 - 27 July 2023. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3539618.3591806
2023
Journal Article
Efficient immediate-access dynamic indexing
Moffat, Alistair and Mackenzie, Joel (2023). Efficient immediate-access dynamic indexing. Information Processing and Management, 60 (3) 103248, 1-24. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2022.103248
2023
Journal Article
Efficient document-at-a-time and score-at-a-time query evaluation for learned sparse representations
Mackenzie, Joel, Trotman, Andrew and Lin, Jimmy (2023). Efficient document-at-a-time and score-at-a-time query evaluation for learned sparse representations. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 41 (4) 96. doi: 10.1145/3576922
2023
Other Outputs
CC-News-En
Mackenzie, Joel (2023). CC-News-En. The University of Queensland. (Dataset) doi: 10.48610/1dcb974
2023
Conference Publication
Accelerating learned sparse indexes via term impact decomposition
MacKenzie, Joel, Mallia, Antonio, Moffat, Alistair and Petri, Matthias (2023). Accelerating learned sparse indexes via term impact decomposition. IIR 2023: Italian Information Retrieval Workshop, Pisa, Italy, 8-9 June 2023. Aachen, Germany: Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen Lehrstuhl Informatik.
2023
Conference Publication
Index-based batch query processing revisited
Mackenzie, Joel and Moffat, Alistair (2023). Index-based batch query processing revisited. 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2023, Dublin, Ireland, 2-6 April 2023. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-28241-6_6
Funding
Current funding
Supervision
Availability
- Dr Joel Mackenzie is:
- Available for supervision
Before you email them, read our advice on how to contact a supervisor.
Supervision history
Current supervision
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Doctor Philosophy
Efficient Next-Generation Information Retrieval Systems
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Shane Culpepper
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Doctor Philosophy
Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence for Democracy
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Gianluca Demartini
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Master Philosophy
Advanced Query Feedback with Large Language Models for Effective and Robust Neural Ranking
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Teerapong Leelanupab
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Master Philosophy
Online discussion summarisation and interaction
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Gianluca Demartini
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Doctor Philosophy
From Auditing to Mitigation: The Role of Persona in Studying and Controlling Ideological Biases in Large Language Models
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Gianluca Demartini
-
Doctor Philosophy
Human-centered verification of language model outputs
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Guido Zuccon, Professor Tim Miller
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Doctor Philosophy
Using Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs to Improve Search and Recommendation
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Shane Culpepper
Completed supervision
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2023
Doctor Philosophy
Teaching Pre-trained Language Models to Rank Effectively, Efficiently, and Robustly
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Guido Zuccon
Media
Enquiries
Contact Dr Joel Mackenzie directly for media enquiries about:
- Big Data
- Data Science
- Data Structures and Algorithms
- Information Retrieval
- Search Algorithms
- Search Engines
- Web Search
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