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.

Prof. Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/.

Dr Johanne Trippas is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the School of Computing Technologies, STEM College. She works at the intersection of conversational systems, interactive information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and dialogue analysis. Recently, her work has focused on developing next-generation capabilities for intelligent systems, including spoken conversational search, digital assistants in cockpits, and artificial intelligence to identify cardiac arrests. Her research aims to improve information accessibility through conversational systems, interactive information retrieval, and human-computer interaction. Trippas is particularly interested in how conversational systems can revolutionise information seeking, especially through generative interactive information retrieval and novel interfaces beyond traditional text search.