Dr Tony Russell-Rose

Staff details

Position

Reader in Computer Science

Tony's research focuses on the intersection of natural language processing, information retrieval and user experience.

Tony Russell-Rose began his career with a PhD investigating the use of statistical and knowledge-based language modelling to improve the accuracy of handwriting recognition systems. He was then awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship at HP Labs working on speech recognition interfaces and a further fellowship at BT Labs working on intelligent agents for information retrieval.

He then joined Canon Research Centre Europe as Senior Research Scientist, where he was promoted to Head of Information Retrieval R&D. He was then appointed Leader of Language Technology at Reuters, where he established a global centre of excellence for NLP. After a period heading up software development at the Advanced Computation Lab of CR-UK, he was approached by Oracle to lead their European UX practice. He is now Director of UXLabs and also Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at Essex University.

He was promoted to Reader in Computer Science in September 2022.

Academic qualifications

PhD Computer Science, Nottingham Trent University
MSc Cognition, Computing & Psychology, Warwick University
BEng (2:1) Production Engineering & Production Management, Nottingham University

Teaching and supervision

Human-computer interaction & user experience
AI and natural language processing
Search & information retrieval

Research interests

Tony's research interests centre on human information interaction; in particular the challenges involved in understanding and modelling the context in which people interact with information and social systems and in developing novel interaction metaphors and technologies that apply that understanding.

His approach combines theory with experimentation, in analyzing existing practices, building novel interactive technologies and systems, and studying their impact on real users in naturalistic settings. Much of his recent work has focussed on the challenges involved in searching, navigating and sense-making within complex information spaces. This has three primary facets:

investigation of novel NLP methods for extracting structure and meaning from unstructured information sources
development of new interaction and visualisation techniques for exploring complex information spaces
empirical studies of human information-seeking behaviour, in particular the user experience of exploratory search and knowledge discovery applications.

Tony has ongoing research collaborations with a variety of organisations, including City University’s School of Informatics, Essex University’s NLP group, Glasgow University’s Information Retrieval group and Sheffield University’s Information Retrieval group.

Publications and research outputs

Book Section

Russell-Rose, Tony and Clough, Pauk. 2015. Mining search logs for usage patterns. In: Markus Hofmann and Andrew Chisholm, eds. Text Mining and Visualization: Case Studies using Open-Source Tools. 40 Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, pp. 153-172. ISBN 9781482237573

Russell-Rose, Tony and Tate, Tyler. 2013. Designing the Search Experience. In: Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate, eds. Designing the Search Experience. Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 23-45. ISBN 9780123969811

Russell-Rose, Tony and Stevenson, Mark. 2009. The Role of Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval: Searching for Meaning and Structure. In: A. Göker and J. Davies, eds. Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century. Wiley, pp. 215-232. ISBN 9780470027622

Article

Panchendrarajan, Rrubaa; Popova, Gergana and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2024. Crisis talk: analysis of the public debate around the energy crisis and cost of living. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14, 74. ISSN 1869-5450

Svarre, Tanja and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2022. Think outside the search box: A comparative study of visual and form-based query builders. Journal of Information Science, ISSN 0165-5515

MacFarlane, Andrew; Russell-Rose, Tony and Shokraneh, Farhad. 2022. Search strategy formulation for systematic reviews: Issues, challenges and opportunities. Intelligent Systems with Applications, 15, 200091. ISSN 2667-3053

Conference or Workshop Item

Sami, Ishrat; Russell-Rose, Tony and Soldatova, Larisa. 2023. 'A Cognitive Theoretical Approach of Rhetorical News Analysis'. In: Text2Story - Sixth Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts held in conjunction with the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023). Dublin, Ireland 2 April 2023.

Zang, Jingfan and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2023. 'A Prototype “Debugger” for Search Strategies'. In: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR ’23). Austin, Texas, United States 19 - 23 March 2023.

Sami, Ishrat; Russell-Rose, Tony and Soldatova, Larisa. 2022. 'Comprehensive contextual visualization of a news archive for aiding story planning'. In: Text2Story 2022. Stavanger, Norway 10 April 2022.

Software

Wrigley, Ave; Russell-Rose, Tony and Bowers, Neil. 1999. HTML::Summary - module for generating a summary from a web page.

Other

Kotcheff, Aaron; Russell-Rose, Tony; Canon Inc. 2007. Apparatus and a method for facilitating searching. EP1207465A2.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Canon Inc. 2006. Data display apparatus and data display method. US-7028050-B1.

Wyard, Peter J; Russell-Rose, Tony; British Telecommunications PLC 2000. Information retrieval system and method that generates weighted comparison results to analyze the degree of dissimilarity between a reference corpus and a candidate document. US6167398.

Professional projects

Tony is founder of 2Dsearch, a start-up applying artificial intelligence, natural language processing and data visualisation to create the next generation of professional search tools. He is also director of UXLabs, a research and design consultancy specialising in complex information-centric applications.

Tony is currently Vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Group and Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Cognitive Computing and AI at Essex University. He has previously served as chair of the CIEHF Human-Computer Interaction group, and Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City University, London.