Damiano Spina

JEDI SEIZE: SEIZE THE MEANS OF RETRIEVAL Website: jedi.inertial.science/seize/ Our proposal for a new initiative aiming to build a community of researchers and practitioners interested in realizing public information access platforms has been accepted for SIGIR Futures (sigir.org/futures/). 🎉🎉🎉

Program coordinators: @bmitra.bsky.social, @danachatter.bsky.social, @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy, @sannevrijenhoek.bsky.social, @md.ekstrandom.net, and @damianospina.com. More information: jedi.inertial.science/seize/

The AIO Platform is now live! It gives Australian university researchers shared infrastructure for studying digital platforms using participant-donated data from services including TikTok, Instagram, ChatGPT, Netflix, Facebook and Spotify. Explore: app.internetobservatory.org.au #AIOPlatform #AIO

Our new piece at @aunz.theconversation.com is out! w/ @danachatter.bsky.social @rmitcomputing.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au #AI #WWW #GoogleZero

AI has broken the economic bargain behind the web, and everybody is losing.

Congrats to @shuoqisun.bsky.social for his best paper award at #FDIA2026 2026.essir.eu/fdia/

What a great way to start #sigir2026! I lost the count of the number of conversations I had during the week that were referencing what @bmitra.bsky.social shared with us!

Proceedings of #SIGIR2026 are online: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi... See you soon in Naarm! @acm.org @acmsigir.bsky.social

Please submit your work for the 8th International Open Search Symposium #OSSYM2026 "Boosting Digital Sovereignity" to be held on 5-7 October 2026 in Berlin, Germany https://indico.cern.ch/event/1622016/

Working on AI, information access, and language technologies in low resource environments? Consider submitting to @acm.org @acmsigir.bsky.social 2026 Low Resource Environments Track: sigir2026.org/en-AU/pages/... #SIGIR2026 #Naarm #Melbourne Catherine Chavula | Monica Landoni | @damianospina.com

Our report titled “Resourcing, technology and audiences: an industry-led agenda for journalism practice and research” is out: apo.org.au/node/332662 @tjthomson.bsky.social @jammh.bsky.social @dbossio.bsky.social @eddyhurc.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au @rmitcomputing.bsky.social

Simon Coghlan, Hui Xian Chia, Falk Scholer, Damiano Spina Control Search Rankings, Control the World: What is a Good Search Engine? https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02957

Meet Damiano Spina, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on Information Retrieval (IR), Text Analytics, and Human-AI interaction. Read more about Spina and how to request a lecture here: buff.ly/1dYp35L

Jiaman He, Zikang Leng, Dana McKay, Damiano Spina, Johanne R. Trippas: Can We Hide Machines in the Crowd? Quantifying Equivalence in LLM-in-the-loop Annotation Tasks https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06658 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06658 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.06658

Kaixin Ji, Danula Hettiachchi, Falk Scholer, Flora D. Salim, Damiano Spina: SenseSeek Dataset: Multimodal Sensing to Study Information Seeking Behaviors https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14792 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14792 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.14792

Shuoqi Sun, Danula Hettiachchi, Damiano Spina: ISMIE: A Framework to Characterize Information Seeking in Modern Information Environments https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07644 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07644 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.07644

The Report on the 3rd Workshop on NeuroPhysiological Approaches for Interactive Information Retrieval (#NeuroPhysIIR 2025) at #SIGIR #CHIIR 2025 is now available in the ACM DL: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... #SIGIRForum @acmsigir.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au @rmitcomputing.bsky.social

The pre-print of our #SIGIRAP2025 paper titled "ISMIE: A Framework to Characterize Information Seeking in Modern Information Environments" is now available arxiv.org/abs/2510.07644 @shuoqisun.bsky.social @danulah.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au @rmitcomputing.bsky.social

The October edition of the ADM+S Newsletter is here. It includes our latest reports on major community-engaged research projects, policy submissions, journal publications, videos & more https://mailchi.mp/rmit/xiao9risv9-17446335 #AI #Automation #DigitalSociety #Research

Look who just joined Bluesky! 👀 It's @acmsigir.bsky.social. 😇

Today we celebrate our extraordinary professional team, whose commitment and dedication make the remarkable achievements of ADM+S researchers possible. Our professional team spans across 8 Australian partner universities. #ResearchAdministratorsDay

The #CLEF2025 Working Notes are now available at: ceur-ws.org/Vol-4038/

🌟Really excited to share the fourth Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (SWIRL) report published in SIGIR Forum! Paper 👉🏻 www.johannetrippas.com/papers/tripp... More info 👉🏻 sites.google.com/view/swirl20... #SWIRL2025 #SIGIR2026 #IR #GenAI #Research #CHIIR2026

In early July, I had the opporunity to discuss The AI Con with @kobotic.bsky.social at RMIT. ABC is presenting part of that conversation in their programme "Big Ideas" on Tuesday Sept 2: www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Today ADM+S proudly celebrates Wear It Purple Day. A day that strives to foster supportive, safe, empowering and inclusive environments for rainbow young people #WearItPurple #Inclusion #DiversityMatters

As AI reshapes how we search, they’re no longer just tools for finding, they’re turning into engines for answering, filtering, and even shaping what we know. Read more in this latest ADM+S Medium article bit.ly/4mCMPmL #SearchEngines #AI #DigitalSociety

A team from the ADM+S at RMIT University has taken out first place amongst 70 teams across 27 countries in the LiveRAG Challenge at SIGIR 2025, showcasing world-class innovation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies admscentre.org/3IBFe8Z

Lucky to witness #IRRJ editor-in-chief @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy signing a copy of the first edition of @irrj.sigmoid.social.ap.brid.gy for Ian Soboroff, author of the paper “Don’t Use LLMs to Make Relevance Judgments” in the volume. #SIGIR2025 irrj.org/article/view...

Join us at the #SIGIR2025 poster session today and check out Jiaman He’s poster #10 on “Characterising Topic Familiarity and Query Specificity Using Eye-Tracking Data” @rmitcomputing.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au @jtrippas.bsky.social @danachatter.bsky.social @gtresearchnews.bsky.social

We are at #SIGIR2025 in Padua, Italy this week. Talk to our editors at the coffee breaks. #SIGIR

🎉 Exciting news for #SIGIRAP2025! This year, we're continuing our tradition of offering both face-to-face and remote participation options. Remote presentations are fully supported! Join us to participate from anywhere! 📡 #HybridConference

Never seen our editor in chief, Djoerd Hiemstra, more happy than today, holding a copy of the first issue of #IRRJ

Day 2 of the 2025 ADM+S Symposium brought together ADM+S researchers, technologists, social service professionals, and policymakers. Sessions showcased innovative responses to the challenges of building inclusive, ethical, and responsible automated social services for everyday Australians. #ADMS2025

We look forward to hearing from our speakers and participants at the 2025 ADM+S Symposium: Automated Social Services this week. Public recordings of key sessions will be made available after the event. #ADMS2025

I’ve just started my 3-year appointment as a Distinguished Speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (#ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. speakers.acm.org/speakers/spi... @rmitcomputing.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au

Congrats to Prof Axel Bruns on being elected a Fellow of the International Communication Association - an honour recognising his influential work in media & communication & his impact on how we understand social media, technology, & society @snurb.info @qutdmrc.bsky.social admscentre.org/3I09sCo

Well deserved recognition to our PhD candidate Kaixin! #proudPhDadvisor @rmitcomputing.bsky.social

Congrats to ADM+S's ‪@danulah.bsky.social & Kacper Sokol on winning the 2025 Google Research Scholar Award in HCI. Their project will develop tailored, interactive explanations that help users better understand the decisions of AI systems ‬ #ResponsibleAI #HCI admscentre.org/444MaCu

Excited to share that my amazing RMIT ADM+S team – @damianospina.com, Kun Ran, @shuoqisun.bsky.social, and Dinh Anh Khoi Nguyen – are global finalists in the #SIGIR #LiveRAG Challenge! I'm incredibly proud of everyone and what we've achieved. What a fantastic journey! 🎉

Doing or planning digital platform research? We want to hear from you. Take our 5–8 min survey to help shape tools, infrastructure & training for researchers. 🔗 tiny.cc/aio-survey #AIO2025survey

🚀 Registration for CLEF 2025 is now open! Come to see the latest results from international participants tackling the shared tasks proposed in CLEF’s evaluation labs. Let’s meet this September 9–12 in Madrid. 👉 Register now: clef2025.clef-initiative.eu #clef2025 #vamosMadrid 🔑

Researcher Spotlight 💡 ADM+S researcher Jiaman He explores human searching behaviour on LLM-based search engines. Jiaman will present the co-authored paper 'Characterising Topic Familiarity and Query Specificity Using Eye-Tracking Data' at the 2025 #SIGIR conference admscentre.org/4dIFb6y

Explore the latest from AIO in our May 2025 newsletter: platform transparency, TikTok research (@admscentre.org.au), election ad tracking, and more. Stay informed on tools, events, and insights shaping digital accountability. Subscribe for more updates: 📩 mailchi.mp/47656dbe5d00... @ardc.edu.au

Are search engines getting worse—or is it time to rethink how we search? ADM+S researchers Oleg Zendel, Ashwin Nagappa & Johanne Trippas share insights on search quality, AI & what it means for how we find trustworthy information online @olegzendel.bsky.social @ashwinnag.bsky.social bit.ly/3F8sx44

My first media interview, a great experience! I really enjoyed the conversation with @jtrippas.bsky.social from @rmitcomputing.bsky.social and Ellen Phiddian from @abcnewsbot.bsky.social. Thanks for the thoughtful discussion and the opportunity to share insights!

Jiaman He, Zikang Leng, Dana McKay, Johanne R. Trippas, Damiano Spina: Characterising Topic Familiarity and Query Specificity Using Eye-Tracking Data https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03136 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03136 https://arxiv.org/html/2505.03136

The pre-print of our #SIGIR2025 short paper is now available: www.damianospina.com/publication/... w/ Jiaman He, Zikang Leng, @danachatter.bsky.social & @jtrippas.bsky.social @rmitcomputing.bsky.social @admscentre.org.au @gtresearchnews.bsky.social

Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval #CHIIR2025 are now available at the ACM DL: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi...

Can #LLMs perform basic numeracy tasks? How do we find out? If you're attending #NAACL2025 drop by to Session B (11:00 - 12:30) to check out our poster and say hi to Rahmad Mahendra: aclanthology.org/2025.finding... w/ L. Cavedon & @karinv.bsky.social @rmitcomputing.bsky.social

🧨 Submission system open. Leaderboard goes live! The RecSys Challenge is one of the most important global competitions in the field of recommender systems. This year, Synerise co-organizes the challenge: t.co/mHXNL6aNQn 🚀 Let the challenge begin—good luck to all! 🚀