Dr. David Hawking appointed Chief Scientist of Funnelback



Leading research scientist, Dr David Hawking, has formally departed CSIRO to take up an appointment as full time Chief Scientist with enterprise search company Funnelback. Dr. Hawking founded the Funnelback technology in 1998 as part of a highly successful project within the CSIRO. Since the establishment of Funnelback Pty Ltd in 2005 to commercialise the technology, he has carried out his Chief Scientist role with the company in a part time capacity while on secondment from CSIRO.

Dr. Hawking published a series of world class papers (http://david-hawking.net/publications.shtml) in the field of information retrieval during his 10 years at CSIRO and is keen to continue his research at Funnelback. "Enormous progress has been made in Web and website search over the past decade", says Dr Hawking, "but major challenges remain in the complex information spaces behind corporate firewalls. We have some promising ideas for enhancing the way organisations search multiple complex heterogeneous information repositories and I'm keen to refine and test them in real customer environments."

Dr. Hawking is a member of the editorial board for the Information Retrieval journal (INRT). He has won a number of honours and awards including an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchatel (http://www2.unine.ch/webdav/site/manifsacademiques/shared/dies/2003/DA03_hawking.pdf) and the 2005 Chris Wallace prize for Australasian Computer Science Research by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (http://www.core.edu.au/). He holds the position of Adjunct Professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University and will continue to supervise Phd students there and at the University of Sydney.

Dr. Hawking will continue to contribute to product development and innovation at Funnelback. His work on: search evaluation in realistic contexts, distributed search techniques, enterprise/intranet search, improvement of search through the exploitation of context, personal search and search efficiency will continue.

Funnelback offers Web and Enterprise Search Engine solutions. The Funnelback search engine has a world class result ranking algorithm, which can be tuned to the specific information retrieval needs of its clients. The technology is used on a daily basis by organizations such as the Australian Government, Westpac Banking Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Securities Exchange, CareerOne and ninemsn.

For further information

Contact: Brett Matson

Phone: (02) 6229 1715

M: 0403 984 600





Dr. David Hawking appointed Chief Scientist of Funnelback