Shane Culpepper

Shane Culpepper is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. Before joining the University of Queensland in 2023, Professor Culpepper held a continuing academic position at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne in 2008. His research focuses primarily on building better Search and Recommendation Systems and is primarily interested how to responsibly integrate efficient and scalable generative AI models for search, recommendation, and question answering. Professor Culpepper’s work has applications in a number of downstream applications for Legal, Health, real estate speculation. He has been instrumental in founding the AI Research Network and the Research Center for Enterprise AI at the University of Queensland.

Over his 17 year career, Professor Culpepper has supervised 19 PhD students and co-authored more than 140 peer reviewed papers with 132 different research collaborators on problems that range from core basic research, such as algorithm efficiency and scalability, to practical real world problems on building and deploying new machine learning algorithms for search and recommendation systems. While often technical, his work is always user-driven as humans are the main consumers of this technology. This user-centric research focus has led to several papers on controlled user studies which guide the development of better evaluation techniques which model human behaviour. In the last 5 years, Professor Culpepper has been a program co-chair for international conferences such as SIGIR and CIKM, and co-organized conferences such as WSDM and SWIRL. Professor Culpepper previously held an ARC DECRA fellowship in 2013 as well as an RMIT Vice-Chancellor's Principal Researcher fellowship in 2017. Before joining the University of Queensland. Professor Culpepper was the founding director of the Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics at RMIT University. In total, he has been a chief investigator on 11 research grants totalling ~$3.8 Million AUD.