Dr Leif Azzopardi

Personal statement

I am an Associate Professor in Artifical Intelligence and Data Science within the Departement of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, where I lead the Interaction Lab (i-lab). My group specializes on developing, evaluating and modelling information rich and information intensive applications and agents -- and thus we develop novel Recommender Systems and Information Retrieval Systems underpinned by Natural Language Processing, Language Modelling, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Given such technology, my group focuses on understanding and modelling how information systems shape and influence people and society. Thus, at the heart of our research is the focus on modelling and predicting the interaction between people and systems. Current and recent research projects include:

• 4 Year EU funded project on Domain Specific Search and Information Extraction and Retrieval (DoSSIER) for Information Professionals, with projects inc:

• Building economic models of information-interactions
• Modelling and measuring the cognitive costs of interaction
• Developing exploratory search interfaces for professional search
• Deep neural models for contextual search

• 3 Year EPSRC funded project on Cumulative Revelations of Personal Data
• 4 Year EPSRC iCase project with BAE on Optimising Information Intensive Interfaces in High Pressured Situations
• 4 year industry project with Thales on Agent Reliability on Trust and Performance in Human-Agent Collaboration
• 4 year project on Analyzing the relationship between Bias and Performance in neural and language models2.5 year Knowledge Exchange Project with BIP Solutions on applying machine learning to procurement search
• Modelling and measuring search engine result pages with economic theory (in collaboration with Microsoft)
• Developing and evaluating interactive conversational search agentd (with Capita)
• Developing continous active learning agents for systematic search

In addition to teaching Deep Learning, I also teach Startup Engineering, where I have written Tango with Django, which is a beginner's guide to web application development using Python and the Django web application framework.