Peter Bailey's C.V. - Work history

Since early 2006 I have been a Project Leader within the ICT Centre of CSIRO. From mid-2006 onwards, this has been for a 15+ person team spanning information retrieval, computational linguistics, and multimedia R&D expertise. The team is split between Canberra and Sydney labs of CSIRO. We are investigating next generation search and information delivery systems, focusing on contextual approaches to improving performance.

The usual range of project leadership activites are encompassed, including administration, strategy, business development and commercialisation assistance, people management, and so on. I also carry out research and software development activities whenever time permits.

In the first half of 2006, I led the creation of a mobile-phone deployed question answering system, called My Instant Expert, using Wikipedia data. The second half of 2006 saw the formation of the Search and Delivery project, holidays, conferences and travel, and the inspiration for various new ideas. A major vehicle of research work for me in the first half of 2007 has been as a co-cordinator of the TREC Enterprise 2007 track, involving the creation a new IR test collection - CERC. Over 35 research and industry organisations are participating in the track in 2007. Activities associated with an MSRA grant for Quality-Oriented Health Search on the Web will also be signficant in the latter part of 2007.

I joined CSIRO to rekindle my research career after 5 years in private industry, and to work with great people like David Hawking once again. Information retrieval had remained a passion of mine, and at Synop we distributed the Panoptic search engine and bundled it with our Sytadel CMS.

I worked for, and was a part-owner of, Synop Pty Ltd, carrying out a number of roles as the needs arose. These included running the Canberra office, business development, financial management, contract negotiation and review, account and partner management, project management, administration and process development, plus general people coordination and management. Very occasionally I got to do some programming, consulting or developing requirements.

Synop was an Australian SME, founded by Nathan Wallace. A short history of Synop describes the tumult of running a software and services startup through some challenging times.

The WAR project had a floating group of two to four people, working closely together. The work was a mixture of research, software development and occasional teaching/supervisory responsibilities.

Our primary research focus was on developing, improving and evaluating Web search and retrieval systems. We wrote a number of research papers. The project was responsible for organising the Web Track at TREC. The Web Track tasks evaluate and compare a number of participants' information retrieval systems in a range of ways, including standard TREC measures of recall and precision, for simulated Web queries. I took primary responsibility for constructing the new 10gB Web document collection (WT10g), first used in the main Web task for TREC-9, 2000. I was also responsible for managing its international distribution, which generated substantial revenue for the group.

The group's development focus was on developing and deploying a Web search system Panoptic to demonstrate our research activities. The system was installed as the ANU's central search service in July 1999, and has been running successfully ever since. It is also used by CSIRO, NineMSN, the ABC, and a number of government agencies both in Australian and overseas. It runs the major search service for the Australia Government's australia.gov.au all of governments web sites search service.

I was involved in developing most of the initial prototype and the first search service, as well as some of enhancements and improvements which led to its successful deployment at other sites.

Our group was also responsible for supervising Honours and PhD students in Computer Science, and lecturing undergraduate courses in document technologies. I was also responsible for installing much of the computing hardware and software for the group.

The ACSys CRC's funding expired in September 2000.

I was responsible for the distributed garbage collection and CORBA/IIOP components. I was also involved in documentation, testing of the system, and general development work. The work was invaluable in giving me complete software life-cycle development experience. It also gave me an appreciation for working in small teams, with tight delivery schedules, and delivering software on time.

OTI shut down their Sydney office in September 1998; I chose not to move to their home office in Ottawa, Canada for personal reasons.

It also gave me extensive experience in working in small teams, publicity and presentations, software releases, organising workshops, project planning and administration. I took on various roles with administration of the Program, coordinating important aspects of it due to the other commitments of the Directors. These included financial budgeting and management, new appointments, annual reports and press releases, interactions with other research groups, and strategy. In its time, the Program was the highest valued collaborative IT research commitment by a Japanese firm in Australia.