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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.

Dr Leah Henrickson is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Cultures at the University of Queensland. She is the author of Reading Computer-Generated Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and other peer-reviewed articles about how we understand text generation systems and output, artificial intelligence, and digital media environments. Dr Henrickson also studies digital storytelling for critical self-reflection, pedagogy, community building, and commercial benefit. She is the author of Digital Storytelling: An Introduction (Polity, 2025).

Dr Henrickson is an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and serves on the Editorial Boards of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia and Anthem Press' 'Anthem Studies in Book History, Publishing and Print Culture' series. She is also an elected non-professorial member of the University of Queensland's Academic Board.

Dr Henrickson is especially keen to collaborate on projects involving digital methods and media, hermeneutics, histories of communications media, and unconventional text production and dissemination.

Dr Jessica Korte is passionate about the ways good technology can improve lives. To ensure technology is “good”, she advocates involving end users in the design process; especially when those people belong to “difficult” user groups - which usually translates to “minority” user groups. Her philosophy for technology design (and life in general) is that the needs of people who are disempowered or disabled by society should be considered first; everyone else will then benefit from technology that maximises usability. Her research areas include Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and Participatory & Collaborative Design.

Jessica was drawn to research by a desire to explore some of the ways technology and design can empower and support people from marginalised groups. She has worked with Deaf children and members of the Deaf community to create a technology design approach, and successfully organised and run international workshops on Pushing the Boundaries of Participatory Design, leading to the World’s Most Inclusive Distributed Participatory Design Project.

Jessica has recently been awarded a TAS DCRC Fellowship to create an Auslan Communication Technologies Pipeline, a modular, AI-based Auslan-in, Auslan-out system capable of recognising, processing and producing Auslan signing.

Jessica is currently looking to recruit research students with an interest in exploring topics in an Auslan context, including machine learning, natural language processing, chatbots, video GAN, or procedural animation.

Hang Li is a Research Officer and graduating PhD candidate in IELab within the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he works closely with Prof. Guido Zuccon, A/Prof. Bevan Koopman, and Dr. Ahmed Mourad. Prior to Ph.D, Hang received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities in United States in 2016.

Hang works at the intersection of Information Retrieval (IR), Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning (ML) applications, where he utilises different relevance feedbacks to empower the information retrieval system. His recent work seeks to address the gap between relevance feedback, deep language models, and information retrieval through different approaches that helps to improve the IR system effectiveness with minimal efficiency cost.

Hang publishes at premier academic venues in IR (e.g. SIGIR, ECIR, WSDM, WWW, TOIS, IJDL). His work is supported by Grains Research and Development Corporation, through the AgAsk project.