Dr Tony Russell-Rose

Staff details

Position Reader in Computer Science
Department Computing
Email t.russell-rose (@gold.ac.uk)
Phone +44 (0)20 7919 5755
Dr Tony Russell-Rose

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, 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

Russell-Rose, Tony; Gooch, Philip and Kruschwitz, Udo. 2021. Interactive query expansion for professional search applications. Business Information Review, 38(3), pp. 127-137. ISSN 0266-3821

Russell-Rose, Tony. 2020. Technological solutions for reproducibility and “showing of work”: a response to “Redundancy of Terms Is Not an Error but Plays a Positive Role in Composing Search Strategies”. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 108(3), pp. 498-499. ISSN 1536-5050

Shokraneh, Farhad and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2020. Lessons from COVID-19 to Future Evidence Synthesis Efforts: First Living Search Strategy and Out of Date Scientific Publishing and Indexing Industry. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 123, pp. 171-173. ISSN 0895-4356

Russell-Rose, Tony and Shokraneh, Farhad. 2020. Designing the Structured Search Experience: Rethinking the Query-Builder Paradigm. Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, 3(1), ISSN 2333-3316

Verberne, Suzan; He, Jiyin; Kruschwitz, Udo; Wiggers, Gineke; Larsen, Birger; Russell-Rose, Tony and de Vries, Arjen. 2019. First International Workshop on Professional Search. ACM SIGIR Forum, 52(1), pp. 153-162. ISSN 0163-5840

Russell-Rose, Tony; Chamberlain, Jon and Azzopardi, Leif. 2018. Information retrieval in the workplace: A comparison of professional search practices. Information Processing & Management, 54(6), pp. 1042-1057. ISSN 0306-4573

Russell-Rose, Tony and Chamberlain, Jon. 2017. Expert search strategies: the information retrieval practices of healthcare information professionals. JMIR Medical Informatics, 5(4), e33. ISSN 2291-9694

Russell-Rose, Tony and Chamberlain, Jon. 2016. Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals. Business Information Review, 33(1), pp. 40-48. ISSN 0266-3821

Fox, John; Alabassi, Alyssa; Patkar, Vivek; Russell-Rose, Tony and Black, Elizabeth. 2006. An ontological approach to modelling tasks and goals. Computers in biology and Medicine, 36(7-8), pp. 837-856. ISSN 0010-4825

Russell-Rose, Tony and Oettinger, Ayelet. 2005. Usability Testing using Paper Prototypes. Interfaces(64), pp. 20-22. ISSN 1351-119X

Lewis, David D; Yang, Yiming; Russell-Rose, Tony and Li, Fan. 2004. Rcv1: A new benchmark collection for text categorization research. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 5(Apr), pp. 361-397. ISSN 1532-4435

Elworthy, David; Russell-Rose, Tony; Clare, Amanda and Kotcheff, Aaron. 2001. A natural language system for retrieval of captioned images. Natural Language Engineering, 7(2), pp. 117-142. ISSN 1351-3249

Russell-Rose, Tony and Wrigley, Ave. 1999. CS-Web: A Lightweight Summarizer for HTML. The Perl Journal,

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.

Sami, Ishrat; Russell-Rose, Tony and Soldatova, Larisa. 2022. 'Comprehensive Terms Board Visualization for News Analysis and Editorial Story Planning'. 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.

Russell-Rose, Tony and MacFarlane, Andrew. 2020. 'Towards Explainability in Professional Search'. In: The 3rd International Workshop on ExplainAble Recommendation and Search (EARS 2020). Xi'an, China 30 July 2020.

Russell-Rose, Tony and Chamberlain, Jon. 2019. 'An Open-Access Platform for Transparent and Reproducible Structured Searching'. In: 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Paris, France 21-25 July 2019.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Chamberlain, Jon and Kruschwitz, Udo. 2019. 'Rethinking ‘Advanced Search’: A New Approach to Complex Query Formulation'. In: European Conference on Information Retrieval. Cologne, Germany 14-18 April 2019.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Chamberlain, Jon and Shokraneh, Farhad. 2019. 'A Visual Approach to Query Formulation for Systematic Search'. In: Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. Glasgow, United Kingdom 10-14 March 2019.

Russell-Rose, Tony and Gooch, Philip. 2018. '2dSearch: A Visual Approach to Search Strategy Formulation'. In: Design of Experimental Search and Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES 2018). Bertinoro, Italy 28-31 August 2018.

Bennett, Zachary; Russell-Rose, Tony and Farmer, Kate. 2017. 'A scalable approach to legal question answering'. In: International Conference on Articial Intelligence and Law. London, United Kingdom 12-16 June 2017.

MacFarlane, Andrew and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2016. 'Search Strategy Formulation: A Framework For Learning'. In: 4th Spanish Conference on Information Retrieval. Grenada, Spain 14-16 June 2016.

Russell-Rose, Tony and Chamberlain, Jon. 2016. 'Real-world expertise retrieval: The information seeking behaviour of recruitment professionals'. In: 38th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2016. Padua, Italy 20-23 March 2016.

Georgiou, Despo; MacFarlane, Andrew and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2015. 'Extracting sentiment from healthcare survey data: An evaluation of sentiment analysis tools'. In: 2015 Science and Information Conference (SAI). London, United Kingdom 28-30 July 2015.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Lamantia, Joe and Makri, Stephann. 2014. 'Defining and Applying a Language for Discovery'. In: 10th International Workshop, Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval (AMR) 2012. Copenhagen, Denmark 24-25 October 2012.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Clough, Paul and Toms, Elaine G.. 2014. 'Categorising Search Sessions: Some Insights from Human Judgments'. In: IIiX 2014: 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium. Reghensburg, Germany 26-30 August 2014.

Azzopardi, Leif; Wilkie, Colin and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2013. 'Towards measures and models of findability'. In: SIGIR 2013 workshop on modeling user behavior for information retrieval evaluation (MUBE 2013). Dublin, Ireland.

Russell-Rose, Tony and Makri, Stephann. 2012. 'Designing for Consumer Search Behaviour'. In: HCIR 2012. Cambridge, United States 4 – 5 October 2012.

Russell-Rose, Tony and Makri, Stephann. 2012. 'A Model of Consumer Search Behaviour'. In: EuroHCIR 2012. Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Tate, Tyler and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2012. 'The Information Needs of Mobile Searchers: A Framework'. In: Proceedings of Searching for Fun, workshop at ECIR 2012. Barcelona, Spain.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Lamantia, Joe and Burrell, Mark. 2011. 'A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery'. In: HCIR 2011. Mountain View, United States.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Lamantia, Joe and Burrell, Mark. 2011. 'A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search'. In: EuroHCIR 2011. Newcastle, United Kingdom.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Aurelio, David and Burrell, Mark. 2009. 'User Interface Design Patterns for Information Search and Discovery'. In: Create 2009. London, United Kingdom.

Blandford, Ann; Green, Thomas; Connell, Iain and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2008. 'Knowledge Representation Environments: An Investigation of the CASSMs between Creators, Composers and Consumers'. In: IFIP International Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction. Salamanca, Spain.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Blake, Catriona; Norris, Beverley and Lowe, Colum. 2007. 'Improving Patient Safety Through Device Design and Usability'. In: International Conference on Contemporary Ergonomics. Nottingham, United Kingdom.

Norris, Beverley; Sevdalis, Nick; Bothwell, Susan; Ranger, Chris and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2007. 'The Role of Patient Identification in Patient Safety'. In: International Conference on Contemporary Ergonomics (CE2007). Nottingham, United Kingdom.

Peleg, Mor; Steele, Rory; Thomson, Richard; Patkar, Vivek; Russell-Rose, Tony and Fox, John. 2005. 'Open-source Publishing of Medical Knowledge'. In: Tenth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (2005). United Kingdom 2005.

Fox, John; Alabassi, Alyssa; Black, Elizabeth; Hurt, Chris and Russell-Rose, Tony. 2004. 'Modelling clinical goals: a corpus of examples and a tentative ontology'. In: Symposium on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols. Prague, United Kingdom.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Stevenson, Mark and Whitehead, Miles. 2002. 'The Reuters Corpus Volume 1-from Yesterday's News to Tomorrow's Language Resources.'. In: LREC. Las Palmas, United Kingdom.

Russell-Rose, Tony; Elworthy, David; Kotcheff, Aaron; Clare, Amanda and Tsonis, Petros. 2000. 'ANVIL: a system for the retrieval of captioned images using NLP techniques'. In: The Challenge of Image Retrieval. Electronic Workshops in Computing. Brighton, United Kingdom.

Kilgarriff, Adam and Russell-Rose, Tony. 1998. 'Measures for corpus similarity and homogeneity'. In: Proceedings of the Third Conference on Empirical Methods for Natural Language Processing. Granada, United Kingdom.

Wyard, Peter and Rose, Tony. 1997. 'An Internet agent for language model construction'. In: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing. Bulgaria.

Rose, Tony G and Wyard, Peter J. 1997. 'An intelligent WWW agent for similarity-based searching'. In: IEE Workshop on Intelligent WWW Agents. London, United Kingdom.

Rose, Tony; Haddock, Nick and Tucker, Roger. 1997. 'The effects of corpus size and homogeneity on language model quality'. In: Fifth Workshop on Very Large Corpora. Beijing, China.

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.

Further profile content

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.