Kate holds a Vice Chancellor's Principal Research Fellowship in RMIT's School of Computing Technologies. Her research explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emerging digital technologies can be made more useful, accessible, and inclusive for people with disability. Kate is a fierce advocate for authentic co-design and consumer consultation, and enjoys working with many partners across the disability community. 

Kate has a clinical background as a speech pathologist, with specialist expertise in the areas of cerebral palsy, neurodiversity, and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). She enjoys teaching students from all disciplines about responsible AI, assistive technology, accessibility, user experience, and co-design methods.

Jessica Balanzategui is Associate Professor in Media and Cinema in the School of Media and Communication. She is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Industry Fellow researching young people's streaming media cultures and industries, and she leads an ARC Discovery Project on how children and young people engage with 'gamble-play' media. Jessica is founding lead of the RMIT-based, multi-institutional Streaming Industries and Genres Network (SIGN). She is Founding and Chief Editor of Amsterdam University Press's book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures.

Jessica's research on the interface between technological and industrial transformation and entertainment cultures has been widely published in the leading international journals in her field, including New Media and Society, Convergence, The Journal of Visual Culture, Television and New Media, Celebrity Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Jessica's speciality is the intersection between screen cultures and technological and industrial transformation, currently focusing on streaming media and platforms. A longstanding focus of Jessica's research is screen genres for and about children - particularly those that trouble expectations and definitions of "child appropriateness" - and challenging or controversial genres like horror, crime, and the Gothic. As part of these areas of specialty, her research illuminates how genre, storytelling, and aesthetics operate in digital cultures, such as video sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok, subscription video on demand services like Netflix and other streaming video services, and online scary storytelling cultures. In tandem, Jessica researches the impacts of technological, industrial, and cultural change on screen genres and their audiences, including child audiences.

Her research has contributed to Parliamentary Inquiries and other policy consultations, and the industry strategies of national arts, culture and media organisations. She often curates and leads public events in partnership with organisations such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

Her ARC Fellowship project, "Enhancing Discoverability of Australian Children's TV in the Streaming Era", examines how children and young people use streaming video platforms to access entertainment content. The research is designed to inform new industry, policy and cultural solutions to improve young people's access to quality, local and age-appropriate screen content in the streaming era. The work is conducted in partnership with the Australian Children's Television Foundation and the Australian Centre of the Moving Image.

Her ARC Discovery project, "Understanding Children’s Mobile Gamble-Play Cultures: Gateways to Gambling", aims to minimize the harms involved in children's access to gambling by developing an understanding of how Australian children use mobile phones to engage in "gamble-play". It will generate a new evidence base to inform evolving regulation around children and gambling, and to improve child and parent literacies about the ways mobile media content introduces children to gambling-like play behaviours.

Jessica is the author or co-editor of 5 books, including: 

-Netflix, Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing: Family Watch Together TV (with Baker and Sandars, Routledge 2023)

-Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures: Folk Monsters, Im/materiality and Regionality (with Craven, Amsterdam UP, 2023)

-The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2018): freely available online via OAPEN after being selected for open-access publication by the "Knowledge Unlatched Select" scheme.

Jessica's other grant-supported interdisciplinary projects include:

- a partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art to cultivate new public understandings of and experiences with the horror genre by staging an experimental multi-site public program

- a project on the futures of cinema exhibition with Village Roadshow that considered the rise of the immersive entertainment experience and entertainment destination

- an examination of how digital technologies are reshaping how children play combining perspectives from media and child development studies.

Jessica welcomes applications from prospective PhD students in cinema and screen, digital cultures, and childhood studies.

Industry Experience:

Lead Organiser/Chief Investigator with ACCA - "Screams on Screen" multi-site public programs (2024) 
Chief Investigator - Australian Children's Television Cultures (funded by ACTF, 2021-24)
Chief Investigator - Scene Hunter and Film Language, New Technology (funded by Village Roadshow)
Regular popular culture critic and film/TV reviewer - ABC
Lead Organiser - Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan & beyond, ACMI 

Research awards include:

The Australian Film Institute Research Collection Fellowship, 2020 

Outstanding Researcher (Early Career), Swinburne University of Technology, 2019

Dean's Award for Emerging Researcher, Swinburne University of Technology, 2018

OAPEN/Knowledge Unlatched Select Open Access Publication Award for The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema, 2018

Teaching awards include:

Australian Awards for University Teaching Excellence Citation, Australian Awards for University Teaching (2021)

Adobe Teaching Innovation Grant, "Making Media that Thinks", RMIT University (2023)

Adobe Teaching Innovation Grant: Learning By Doing,Digital Paratexts, Swinburne Univeristy of Technology (2022)

Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence, Swinburne University of Technology (2021)

Faculty of Health, Arts, and Design Teaching Excellence Award, Swinburne University of Technology (2020)

I am a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University. My research is on Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, in particular within interdisciplinary areas. I am also an Honorary Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne. I am part of the Center for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI) and was previously part of the now completed ARC Training Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies.

Jeffrey is a Professor in the School of Computing Technologies. His research interests lie in machine learning, recommender systems, responsible AI, data-driven optimisation and interdisciplinary research that combines these fields to solve social and industry-based applications. He has worked with industry and non-profit partners in retail, sustainability, energy, manufacturing and health.

Dr Yimin Chen is a lecturer in Interaction, Technology & Information in the School of Computing Technologies. His research focuses on the prevention of online gender-based violence through technological and social interventions. His other interests include information behaviour, human-computer interaction, mis/disinformation, online trolling, and internet culture and communication more broadly. 

Dr Haytham Fayek is an artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher. His research interests are broadly in artificial intelligence, machine learning, machine reasoning, deep learning, continual learning, and machine perception.

Lisa Given is Director & Co-Founder, Centre for Human-AI Information Environments; Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform and Professor of Information Sciences in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies and the School of Computing Technologies.

Professor Lisa Given is an interdisciplinary researcher in human information behaviour whose work brings a critical, social research lens to studies of technology use and user-focused design. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and of the international Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), her studies embed social change, focusing on diverse settings and populations, and methodological innovations across disciplines. A former President of ASIS&T, Prof Given has served on the Australian Research Council’s (ARC’s) College of Experts. She holds numerous grants funded by ARC, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, working with university and community partners across disciplines. She is lead author of the 5th edition of Looking for Information: Examining Research on How People Engage with Information (2023) author of 100 Questions (and Answers) about Qualitative Research (2016), and editor of The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods (2008).

Selected current grants:

2025-2030 Australian Research Council, Industrial Transformation Research Hub. $4,750,000 (AUD). Co-Investigator (Lead, Program 1: Socially Responsive, Ethical Design to Support User Adoption of Innovations). “ARC Research Hub for Intelligent Contaminant Sensing in Complex Environments (IC-SensE Hub).” Lead Investigator (ITRH Director): Prof Sumeet Walia, RMIT University. Co-Investigators (Program 1): Prof Rachel Ankeny, University of Adelaide; and, Prof Priya Rajagopalan & Dr Saffron Bryant, RMIT University.

Selected awards:

2021-2025 Stanford University/Elsevier’s Top 2% Most Cited Researchers Globally

2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Award, RMIT University – Excellence in Graduate Research Supervision
2025 RMIT University, Media & Communications – Media Hall of Fame Award

Selected scholarly appointments:

- Editor-in-Chief, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology

- Member, Science and Methodology Committee, International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE)

- Distinguished Member, Association for Information Science and Technology

- College of Experts, Social, Behavioural and Economics Panel, Australian Research Council (2011-2014)

- President (elected), Association for Information Science & Technology (2016-2019)

- Panel Member, Canada’s Interagency (SSHRC, CIHR, NSERC) Advisory Panel on Research Ethics (2010-2012)

- Panel Member, Council of Canadian Academies, Expert Panel on Research Integrity (2009-2010)

- President (elected), Canadian Association for Information Science (2005-2008)

Professor Nicola Henry is Deputy Director of the Social Equity Research Centre at RMIT University. She is a socio-legal scholar with over 25 years research experience in the gender-based violence field. Her research, focusing on the prevalence, nature and impacts of online and offline sexual abuse, has had a significant impact on law, policy and educational reform in Australia and internationally. Nicola is a member of the Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group. She regularly provides advice to technology companies to help shape their policies and practices around sexual violence and harmful online content. She was Expert Advisor on the development of the eSafety Office’s image-based abuse portal as well as the award-winning eSafety Women: Online Training for Frontline Workers.

Nicola's ARC Future Fellowship project (2021-25) examined the role of digital tools, services and platforms for detecting, preventing and responding to image-based sexual abuse. She is leading two Google-funded projects, including one involving a survey on image-based sexual abuse in ten different countries, and the other investigating the prevalence, nature and harms of AI-generated image-based sexual abuse (also known as “deepfake pornography”). She was also a Chief Investigator on several projects on alternative reporting options for sexual assault survivors (led by Prof. Georgina Heydon, RMIT), and is working in collaboration with La Trobe University on a sexual violence prevention project (led by Prof. Leesa Hooker, LTU).

Nicola's books include: War and Rape: Law, Memory and Justice (2011: Routledge); Preventing Sexual Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture (2014: Palgrave Macmillan; co-edited with A. Powell); Rape Justice: Beyond the Criminal Law (2015: Palgrave Macmillan; co-edited with A. Powell & A. Flynn); Sexual Violence in a Digital Age (2017: Palgrave Macmillan; co-authored with A. Powell); Image-Based Sexual Abuse: A Study of the Causes and Consequences of Non-Consensual Nude or Sexual Imagery (2021: Routledge; co-authored with C. McGlynn, A. Flynn, K. Johnson, A. Powell & A. Scott); and The Emerald Handbook on Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse (2021: Emerald; co-edited with J. Bailey & A. Flynn). She has published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Computers in Human Behavior, Violence Against Women, Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, Gender & Society, and The Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Nicola completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in Criminology in 2005; a Masters of Arts in Political Science in 2000; and a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Hons) in 1997.

Dr Hettiachchi is a Lecturer at the School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S), where he was previously a Research Fellow. His key research interests are crowdsourcing, social computing, responsible AI, and human-computer interaction. Dr Hettiachchi researches user interactions with automated decision-making systems and explores how biases manifest, influencing future system decisions and user perceptions. He obtained his PhD from the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and his thesis examined data quality in crowdsourcing.

Dr Hettiachchi has published his research in flagship venues of human-computer interaction (CHI), social computing (CSCW), and crowdsourcing (HCOMP). He has received funding, including the Google Research Scholar Award, the DAAD AInet Fellowship in Human-Centred AI, ACCAN Grants, and an Early Career Research Grant from ADM+S. He has over seven years of teaching experience as a lecturer and tutor at three universities in Australia and Sri Lanka. Dr Hettiachchi actively collaborates and engages with the international research community and has served in numerous conference organising and program committees.

Professional interests:
- Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
- Associate Chair at CHI 2022-2026.
- Program Committee member for conferences, including The Web Conference, WSDM, SIGIR, CIKM, and HCOMP.
- Reviewer for esteemed journals, including PACMHCI(CSCW), IMWUT, IP&M, and TOIS.
- Organising Committee member for international conferences, including CHI 2019, HCOMP 2022, and MobileHCI 2024.

Industry experience:
Dr Hettiachchi has worked as a Full-Stack Software Engineer at Sysco Labs, primarily focused on data engineering and analytics. During his PhD, he worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon (AWS), United States.

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at RMIT University and an adjunct Researcher at the Empathic Computing Lab led by Prof Mark Billinghurst at the University of South Australia. My research focuses on using Mixed Reality to superpower human abilities, e.g. how to use different modalities to improve cross-reality collaboration, how to augment social interactions in in-situ environments, and how to utilise biosignals and behaviours to support human-AI empathy.

Based in Melbourne (current) /Seattle (home), my user-driven approaches are derived from years of the customer-focused tech industry (as a content manager and product designer) and academic (as a research scientist intern) experience. Previously, I have worked with Meta Reality Labs (Research), Microsoft, Xbox, Amazon, startups, NGOs, and research centres in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

I am looking for MR-related research collaboration/funding/projects in both academia and industry.

Ryan Kelly is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University. He is a researcher in the field of Human-Computer Interaction with interests in social computing, digital health and mixed reality.

Ryan’s research aims to shape the future of technology-enabled social connection and wellbeing. His work has explored the design of communication technologies for conveying effort and care in close relationships, the use of communication systems to alleviate homesickness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the use of video calling systems to mediate intergenerational connections. Currently, Ryan examines how emerging AI systems are transforming interpersonal interactions and social connectedness.

Ryan has collaborated on the interaction design component of several digital health initiatives. This includes the Music-Attuned Care via eHealth (MATCH) project, which focused on developing technology to support music therapy training for caregivers of people with dementia. Ryan has collaborated with Swinburne's Centre for Mental Health to create and evaluate a groundbreaking VR application for mindfulness meditation. This application is now freely available to over 200,000 Australians in need of mental health support. During his time at the Open University UK, Ryan evaluated a novel handheld ‘Painpad’ device for enabling self-logging of pain by hospital inpatients. Painpad has since been in active use within the UK's National Health Service for over six years.

Ryan has established strong industry collaborations with organizations including PHORIA, Google, Netflix and the Worldwide Fund for Nature. His recent research has focused on enhancing communication technologies for older adults, particularly on the use of video calling in aged care during the COVID-19 pandemic. This work led to partnerships with Dossy.co, Ageing with Grace, and Uniting AgeWell to develop a simplified video calling system supporting connections between older adults and volunteers, with funding from Aged Care Research & Industry Innovation Australia.

Ryan’s research has garnered significant media coverage. His work has been featured in print, online, radio and televised media, broadcast in over 20 countries and reaching more than 200 million people globally. He has appeared as a guest speaker in documentaries and on television, including Al-Jazeera's "All Hail the Algorithm" documentary. 

Ryan regularly provides service to the international HCI community as an expert reviewer and committee member. Ryan has held significant roles including program committee membership for ACM's flagship CHI conference (since 2020) and the ACM CSCW conference (since 2018). He served as an Editor for CSCW 2025 and as awards co-chair for CSCW 2023. Additionally, he has been long papers co-chair for OzCHI, Australia's premier HCI conference.

Ryan is currently seeking PhD candidates for projects focused on human-centered AI for social connection and supporting online safety for older adults.

Dr Jonathan Kolieb is Director of RMIT's Business and Human Rights Centre, and Associate Professor in Law at the School of Law, RMIT University.

Jonathan’s research and teaching interests focus on global governance issues, including current projects on international conflict resolution, business and human rights, and the accountability of transnational corporations under international humanitarian law. His PhD dissertation was entitled: “Corporate Peacebuilding and the Law: Regulating the Private Sector for Conflict Transformation.”

His written work includes academic articles in leading Australian and international journals, UN peacekeeping training documents, and pieces in the mainstream press such as Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Australian newspapers. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the George Washington University Law School, and a Graduate Visitor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jonathan has held positions with the Government of Australia, various think-tanks and non-governmental organisations, focusing on human rights and international affairs. These roles include serving as Congressional Liaison Officer at the Embassy of Australia in Washington DC, and as Legal Consultant for the United Nation’s Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

Jonathan holds a PhD (Law) from University of Melbourne, an LL.M. (International Law) and an M.A. (International&Area Studies) from University of California, Berkeley and undergraduate Law and Politics degrees from the University of Melbourne and Monash University.

Jonathan has received several awards and grants in recognition of, and to advance, his scholarship. These include a RMIT College of Business Research Excellence Awards (2016 and 18), the A.O. Capell Prestigious PhD Scholarship from the University of Melbourne (2011-2015); a Rotary World Peace Fellowship (2004-06); a Human Rights Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley (2007); and the Rufus Davis Memorial Prize for Politics from Monash University (2001).

For a full list of Jonathan's publications visit Google Scholar or Academia.edu.

Dr Alexandra Ridgway is a Lecturer in Criminology and Justice Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia where she teaches into the Master of Public Policy. Alexandra currently teaches the following subjects: Evidence, Policy and Practice (POLI1095); Ethics, Values and Public Policy (POLI1065) and Integrated Policy and Research Project (POLI1100).   

As a sociologist and criminologist, Alexandra uses her research to examine family, personal and intimate life with a particular focus on family breakdown and divorce; family and sexual violence; and grief and loss. Alexandra’s work primarily examines these issues within the context of migration. Underpinning Alexandra’s research is a deep interest in the way in which different forms of law and regulation shape these personal experiences. More recently she has turned her attention towards the increasing role of technology, including AI, in regulatory systems and services and how this too has the power to influence human practices and relationships. Her work can be found in various publications such as Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, British Journal of Criminology, New Media and Society, Gender Work and Organization, Australian Feminist Studies and Population, Space and Place.

Alexandra is currently working with Dr Joseph van Buuren on a research project titled Visualising Public Legal Information: Using Graphic Narratives to Address Community Legal Information Need. This project is in partnership with ARC Justice, a community legal centre based in regional Victoria (Bendigo and Shepparton), with the project funded by a Victorian Law Foundation (VLF) Everyday Legal Grant. 

In terms of previously funded projects, in 2025, Alexandra was part of the team (with Joann Cattlin, Dist Prof Lisa M.Given and Prof Falk Scholer) who delivered the workshop, Transdiscplinarity for Socially Responsible Artifical Intelligence: Aligning Expertise in Social Sciences and Computing Research funded by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia's Workshop Grants. She was also a member of the research team behind the project Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Generated Image-Based Sexual ​​Abuse: Prevalence, Attitudes and Impacts funded by Google from 2024-5. 

In 2025, Alexandra was awarded a Dean's Rising Star Award for the School of Global Urban and Social Studies (GUSS) at RMIT University. In the same year she received the 2025 Social Equity Research Centre's (SERC) Early Career Researcher's Best Paper Award for the paper, Time Will Tell: A Temporal Analysis of Victim-Survivor’s Formal Support-Seeking for Co-occurring Family Violence and Sexual Harm, which she first authored alongside Dr Gemma Hamilton, Prof Anastasia Powell and Prof Georgina Heydon. Alexandra's work has received other acknowledgments such as a commendation in 2023 by the Australian Death Studies Society (ADSS) for her paper, Love Loss and a Doctorate: An autoethnography of grieving while writing a PhD; highly commended paper presentation prize for Centering Migrant Voices: Problem Centred Interviewing as Human-Centred Interviewing at the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre (MMIC)'s New Generation Symposium in 2021; first prize for her poster presentation Rise Like a Phoenix: Migrant Women's Habitus After Divorce at the Bourdieu Study Group's Biennial Conference in 2018 and the ANZSOC Student Paper Prize in 2013 for her Master's paper Talking Trauma.

In 2025, Alexandra was awarded a writing fellowship with Australian Policy and History and the Centre for Contemporary Histories.    

Currently, Alexandra is the Chairperson of SHAPE Futures EMCR Futures (2026-) where she was Co-Deputy Chair from 2024-5. She was also the Thematic Leader of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA)'s Crime and Governance Group with Dr Joseph van Buuren from 2024-2025. Alexandra is proud to be a moderator with the blog "The Power to Persuade". 

At RMIT, Alexandra is a member of the Social Equity Research Centre (SERC) and Centre for Human-AI Information Environments (CHAI). Externally, she is a member of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA); Australian New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC); Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA); Australian Death Studies Society (ADSS) and Australian Women's History Network (AWHN). 

Mark Sanderson is Professor of Information Retrieval at RMIT University where he is Dean of Research for the STEM College. Mark received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, in 1997. Mark was the first researcher show the value of snippets, a component of search interfaces which are now a standard feature of all search engines. While a faculty member at the Sheffield Information School, Mark co-founded, in 2003, the annual imageCLEF evaluation campaign, which continues to run today. The event has created over 60 research evaluation tasks for the image retrieval and image processing community involving over 500 international research groups. Mark was general chair of ACM SIGIR in 2004 and PC chair of ACM SIGIR 2009 & 2012; and ACM CIKM 2017. Mark was inducted into the ACM SIGIR Academy in 2024.

I'm a Professor of Information Access and Retrieval in the discipline of Interaction, Technology & Information, in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

My research in the area of information access and retrieval focuses on understanding how tools such as search engines, recommender systems, chatbots and LLMs can assist users to resolve their information needs, and how their effectiveness can be measured.

Lecturer, School of Law.

Dr Nicole Shackleton is a socio-legal researcher focused on gender and sex, technology and regulation. Using qualitative empirical research, Dr Shackleton explores how gender and technology interact, and consequently how technologies may be regulated to reduce abuse and harassment.

Dr Shackleton is a leading voice in addressing online misogyny and gendered hate speech. Through her research and public engagement, she has influenced national conversations on the legal regulation of online abuse, particularly targeting women in politics, journalism, and sports. Dr Shackleton's contributions to policy discussions and media platforms, including The Guardian and ABC, have helped shape legislative reforms, such as the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2025, which strengthens protections against gender-based hate speech. Her work continues to drive legal and societal recognition of the harms of digital misogyny, advocating for stronger legislative responses.

As research coordinator of the Technology, Law and Society Research Group, Dr Shackleton facilitates the group's activities and promotes research focusing on the continuously evolving intersection between emerging technologies, legal frameworks and regulation, and its societal impacts. 

Research projects:

Dr Shackleton is currently working on two projects, competitively funded by RMIT. In the project, 'Sharenting Practices on Instagram in Australia: Threats to Security and Privacy and Potential Countermeasure', which received $48k from the Boundary Crossing Grant Program, the research team is investigating the prevalence of sharenting among Australian parents on Instagram. They are currently in the process of analysing data and writing up our findings. 

The project 'Addressing the Dark Digital: Towards a National Digital Harms Observatory' received a grant of $32k from the Enabling Strategic Impact Proposal Scheme. This is a transdisciplinary project which will explore the extent, form and experience of digital harms, with the aim of informing regulators and key stakeholders. This project is currently in the early implementation phase, with most data collection to be completed by the end of 2025.

Industry experience:
Dr Shackleton has legal experience volunteering at Youthlaw, a CLC dedicated to young people who come in contact with the criminal justice system. She has also interned in international criminal law as a member of the Nuon Chea defence team at the former Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia.

Availability:

Dr Shackleton is available for collaboration, media enquires and article reviews. Check out her LinkedIn profile for a detailed description of her experience and engagement.

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
• Associate Investigator in ADM+S Phase 2 projects:
  • • The Australian Search Experience 2.0

• • • Critical Capabilities for Inclusive AI
    • GenAISim: Simulation in the Loop for Multi-Stakeholder Interactions with Generative Agents

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).

• Evaluation and Masurement Capability Co-Lead for 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


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.

Dr T.J. Thomson is an associate professor and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at RMIT, where he co-leads The News, Technology, and Society Network. His research is united by its focus on visual communication.

T.J. is the author of a number of books and edited collections, including Everyday Visual News: Audience Expectations, Engagements, and Meanings (Routledge, 2026), The Routledge Companion to Visual Journalism (2025), and To See and Be Seen: The Environments, Interactions, and Identities Behind News Images (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

T.J. has obtained more than $1.5 million in research funding from a number of organisations, including the Australian Research Council, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Office of the Queensland Chief Scientist, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and the International Visual Literacy Association. He has also been awarded research fellowships in China (Ningbo) and Germany (Berlin and Bochum).

T.J. undertakes research, postgraduate supervision, and media commentary in the following areas:

• visual communication
• visual journalism
• media production
• visual culture
• journalism studies

Leadership

T.J. is actively involved nationally and internationally in a number of Associations and initiatives that contribute to the interdisciplinary visual communication field. These include serving as an international engagement editor of Digital Journalism, serving on the editorial board of the journal Visual Communication Quarterly and acting as one of its associate editors (from 2017—2025), serving on the editorial board of Communication Research and Practice, and serving as an officer in a number of national and international journalism and communication associations, including the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia, the National Communication Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the International Communication Association (as international liaison, secretary, and vice-chair of the Visual Communication Studies Division).

Awards and honours

T.J.'s peers have recognised his research and disciplinary contributions with a number of awards and honours, including the Communication and Ageing Outstanding Journal Article Award from the National Communication Association; the James Edwards Article of the Year Award from the National Communication Association; the Diane S. Hope Book of the Year Award from the National Communication Association; the Anne Dunn Scholar of the Year Award, jointly bestowed by the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association and the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia; the Distinguished Young Alumnus Award from Chadron State College; the Mizzou Recent Alumni Honoree Award from the University of Missouri; and top paper awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the International Communication Association.

In 2022, T.J.'s peers elected him to the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his significant contributions to the academy, the professions and/or society as a whole. In 2023, the Australian Academy of the Humanities awarded him the Max Crawford Medal, the country's most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities.

Industry Experience

T.J. has experience with both journalistic and corporate communication. Before entering academia, he worked as a visual journalist and designer for a number of news outlets and organizations, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and the Omaha World-Herald. Corporate clients include QuickFire Networks, which was acquired by Facebook in 2015; Colorado Academy; and HotelTonight.