ADM+S PhD student Shuoqi Sun wins Best Paper Award at European Summer School for Information Retrieval
Authosr ADM+S Centre
Date 20 October 2026
Shuoqi Sun, a second-year PhD candidate from RMIT University at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), recently attended the European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR) and The 14th PhD Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) where he received the Best Paper Award for his research on modern information seeking.
The European Summer School on Information Retrieval gives PhD students the opportunity to interact with renowned scholars via hands-on sessions and workshops. It aims to nurture discussion on approaches to information access and encourages the adoption of the latest software, datasets and more.
Taking place during ESSIR, The 14th PhD Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) gave Shuoqi the opportunity to share early stage research and form connections with other information retrieval (IR) scholars.
During FDIA, Shuoqi presented his PhD research outline, ‘Characterizing the Evolving Landscape of Modern Information Seeking’, which won the Best Paper Award. Shuoqi’s research sheds light on how people search for information. His study uses surveys, information seeking (IS) frameworks and experiments exploring neurophysiological signals (such as EEG and eye-tracking) to offer insights into the current landscape of IS.
Shuoqi said he was grateful for the opportunity to attend ESSIR and FDIA, as it provided the opportunity to practice invaluable presentation and communications skills.
“Research needs to be heard, and the skills of presenting should be practiced. FDIA has a group of audience members who are not very familiar with your specific research but are experts in other IR topics, so this is the perfect place to test your research communication, make mistakes, and form your presentation style,” Shuoqi said.
“Learning from each other and engaging with the community are key to staying tuned and creative,” he said.
Read Shuoqi’s paper Characterizing the Evolving Landscape of Modern Information Seeking.
