Research Fellow takes ADM+S research abroad for feedback and collaboration
Author
Date 6 March 2025
ADM+S Research Fellow Dr Ashwin Nagappa has returned from Europe, after attending the ECREA Communication History 2025 workshop in Geneva, Switzerland, and visiting ADM+S Partner Investigators at Hans Bredow Institut and the University of Amsterdam.
The 2025 ECREA Workshop was held at CERN in Geneva, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research Centre, one of the world’s largest and most prestigious scientific laboratories and the birth place of the web
The theme for this year’s workshop was ‘Communication Networks Before and After the Web: Historical and Long-term Perspective’, bringing together international scholars from media history, media archaeology and digital media, to explore the origins of the web and its evolution into one of the most influential technologies of our time.
“As I engaged with scholars working on contemporary AI tools and research, I found it fascinating that the web, now a central information system in our daily lives, was never originally conceived as such—it was designed as a tool for scientists to accelerate experiments.,” said Ashwin.
“It’s important to recognize that the web forms the foundation of our everyday search and social media experiences, providing the vast information that AI relies on..”
From Geneva, Ashwin then travelled to Hans Bredow Institut in Hamburg, where he was welcomed by Prof Judith Möller, Scientific Director at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research and Professor of Empirical Communication Research, Media Use and Social Media Effects the University of Hamburg.
He also visited ADM+S Partner Investigator Prof Maarten de Rijke and his team at the Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Amsterdam.
With both groups, Ashwin was given the opportunity to present the explainer, ‘What is search experience?’ – a brief introduction to the ADM+S Australian Search Experience 2.0 Project, including early developments and future plans for the research – which is set to be developed into a four-part blog series in March 2025.
“This talk draws on a literature review of both information retrieval – the technological aspect – and search experience – the social aspect, and has been refined over the past few months with feedback from colleagues across ADM+S.
“This explainer has proven to be a valuable tool for expanding different aspects of the Australian Search Experience, identifying connections across its subprojects, and exploring crossovers with other signature projects within the centre.”
These presentations were followed by Q&A sessions, providing valuable insights for refining the workflow of the project.
Being surrounded by experts in information retrieval at the University of Amsterdam, Ashwin was able to learn about their research on various aspects of AI and Search, noting synergies between their respective projects, and opportunities for potential collaboration.
“For instance, some PhD students specialize in evaluating AI-generated text for human-like quality, which could support our efforts to automate search processes.
This trip was supported by ADM+S and QUT.
