Dr. Spina is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing Technologies (Interaction, Technology, and Information discipline) at RMIT University. His research areas are Information Retrieval and Text Analytics. In particular, his research focuses on Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR), including user–system interactions in voice-enabled intelligent assistants, and evaluation of information access systems, including effectiveness measures of search engines and fairness–aware evaluation.

Dr. Spina is the recipient of an ARC Discovering Early-Career Research Award (DECRA, 2020-2023) and the 2021 RMIT Award for Research Impact (Technology). Dr. Spina is also member of the RMIT-ADM+S team that won the 1st place at the international SIGIR 2025 LiveRAG Challenge and the 1st place of the dynamic evaluation (with real user queries) at the international NeurIPS 2025 MMU-RAG Challenge.

Dr. Spina is also a 'Mestre' of Capoeira (Afro-Brazilian martial art) and plays music (Samba with the band Wombatuque).

Current Research Projects

• Lead Investigator of the project Walert (customised AI chatbot using Retrieval-Augmented Generation): http://www.damianospina.com/projects/walert
• Lead Investigator of the ADM+S project Measuring and Quantifying Bias and Engagement

Key Activities

• Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, School of Computing Technologies.
• Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

• RMIT Research Lead at the Australian Internet Observatory (AIO).

• Exceutive Member of the RMIT STEM Leading Research Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI).
• Member of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE).

• Distinguished Speaker at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): https://speakers.acm.org/speakers/spina_21582

• Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) journal.

• Program Committee member for several conferences including SIGIR, WWW, NAACL, CIKM, ECIR, EMNLP, and CHIIR, among others.
• Reviewer for renowned journals including Elsevier IP&M, ACM TOIS, EPJ Data Science, ACM TIST, and JASIST, among others.

• Responsible Practice Facilitator for the School of Computing Technologies (SCT)

• SCT Representative at the STEM College Academic Governance Committee (CAGC)

Industry Experience

Dr. Spina has collaborated in research with colleagues in different industry organisations, such as Microsoft, Google, ABC, SEEK, ACCIONA, Realthing, Inference Solutions, Abbrevi8, and Llorente&Cuenca.

Dr. Spina is the co-author of a patent on a system and method for automating the training of enterprise customer response systems using a range of dynamic or generic data sets.