STAFF PROFILE
Professor Lawrence Cavedon
Lawrence Cavedon is a Professor in the School of Science, and the Associate Dean and Discipline Head of Computer Science and IT. His research interests include spoken dialogue and speech interfaces, biomedical and health analytics, and Artificial Intelligence in general.
His research interests include spoken dialogue and speech interfaces, biomedical and health analytics, and Artificial Intelligence in general.Professor Lawrence Cavedon's career has spanned academia and the IT industry as both researcher and software engineer, leaving him with a strong interest in industry-focused problems. Much of his recent and current research projects are performed in collaboration with industry and domain partners, including SEEK, Elsevier, IBM Research, Real Thing Entertainment, and health organisations Alfred Health, Melbourne Health, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, and Telstra Health.
While at Stanford, he collaborated on funded projects with NASA, Bosch Corp, VW America, and Boeing. He has also led software product teams at Verticalnet Inc in Silicon Valley.
Lawrence is the Discipline Head for Computer Science and IT.
His recent teaching activities have been focused on advanced Software Engineering courses, such as Software Engineering: Process and Tools (COSC2299) and Systems Architecture (ISYS1088/89). In 2020, he is teaching a new course: The Data Science Professional.
Lawrence has been Chief Investigator on 6 past or current ARC Linkage grants, including 2 as Lead CI, as well as other grants totaling approx. $3million since 2014. He is also a CI on a new ARC Industry Transformational Training Centre in conjunction with UniMelb and IBM Research, on Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies.
See Lawrence's Google scholar page for a list of his publications.
- Ph.D. Cognitive Science, The University of Edinburgh (UK)
- M. Sc. Computer Science, The University of Melbourne
- B. Sc. (Honours), Computer Science, The University of Melbourne
Previous appointments
- 2005-2014: NICTA (National ICT Australia), Victoria Research Lab
- 2002-2005: Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information
- 2000-2002: Verticalnet Inc. (California), Advanced Technologies Group
- 1987-1990: Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute
Lawrence has worked in the tech industry in both Australia and Silicon Valley in California.
In Silicon Valley, he was a Scientist and a Lead Engineer in the Advanced Technologies Group at Verticalnet Inc., the first Business-to-Business technology company to IPO. In Australia, he worked for the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, a contract R&D organisation applying AI techniques to industry problems.
Lawrence also collaborates extensively with industry in his research. At NICTA (National ICT Australia, Australia's Centre for ICT Research Excellence), he led projects on the topic of biomedical and health analytics, in collaboration with Alfred Health, Melbourne Health, Barwon Health and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. At Stanford University, he collaborated closely on joint projects with Bosch Corp, VW America, Boeing, and NASA.
At RMIT, he has research projects with SEEK, IBM Research, Elsevier, Telstra Health, and other companies and organisations.
He also likes to engage industry in his teaching and regularly organises presenters from large corporations (e.g., IBM, Amazon Web Services), mid-sized innovative technology companies (Redbubble, Zendesk), and startups.
Commercial innovation
- Led team that developed first commercial Semantic Web Services platform
- NSW Engineering Excellence Award (R&D) for Thinking Head project
- Stanford CSLI dialogue system commercially licensed by major corporations
Patents
- F. Weng, L. Cavedon, et al: Method and system for interactive conversational dialogue for cognitively overloaded device users; US Patent 7,716,056.
- D. Mirkovic, L. Cavedon: Dialogue management using scripts; US Patent 8,041,570
- D. Mirkovic, L. Cavedon, et al: Dialogue management using scripts and combined confidence scores; US Patent 7,904,297.
- H. Cheng, L. Cavedon, et al: Method and system for adaptive navigation using a driver's route knowledge; US Patent 7,424,363
- Trippas, J.,Spina, D.,Thomas, P.,Sanderson, M.,Joho, H.,Cavedon, L. (2020). Towards a model for spoken conversational search In: Information Processing & Management, 57, 1 - 19
- Vukovic, M.,Sethu, V.,Parker, J.,Cavedon, L.,Lech, M.,Thangarajah, J. (2019). Estimating cognitive load from speech gathered in a complex real-life training exercise In: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 124, 116 - 133
- Albahem, A.,Spina, D.,Scholer, F.,Cavedon, L. (2019). Meta-evaluation of Dynamic Search: How Do Metrics Capture Topical Relevance, Diversity and User Effort? In: Advances in Information Retrieval 41st European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2019, Cologne, Germany, April 14�18, 2019, Proceedings, Part I, Cologne, Germany, April 14-18, 2019
- Trippas, J.,Spina, D.,Cavedon, L.,Joho, H.,Sanderson, M. (2018). Informing the design of spoken conversational search: Perspective paper In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction�and Retrieval (CHIIR '18), New Brunswick, United States, 11 - 15 March 2018
- Salehi, B.,Spina, D.,Moffat, A.,Sadeghi, S.,Scholer, F.,Baldwin, T.,Cavedon, L.,Sanderson, M.,Wong, W.,Zobel, J. (2018). A living lab study of query amendment in job search In: Proceedings of SIGIR '18: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval, Ann Arbor, United States, 8-12 July 2018
- Fayek, H.,Cavedon, L.,Wu, H. (2018). On the Transferability of Representations in Neural Networks Between Datasets and Tasks In: Continual Learning Workshop, 32nd Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018), Montreal, Canada, 2-8 December 2018
- Albahem, A.,Spina, D.,Scholer, F.,Moffat, A.,Cavedon, L. (2018). Desirable Properties for Diversity and Truncated Effectiveness Metrics In: Proceedings of the 23rd Australasian Document Computing Symposium 2018, Dunedin, New Zealand, 11-12 December, 2018
- Pitson, G.,Banks, P.,Cavedon, L.,Verspoor, K. (2017). Developing a manually annotated corpus of clinical letters for breast cancer patients on routine follow-up In: Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 235, 196 - 200
- Spina, D.,Maistro, M.,Ren, Y.,Sadeghi, S.,Wong, W.,Baldwin, T.,Cavedon, L.,Moffat, A.,Sanderson, M.,Scholer, F.,Zobel, J. (2017). Understanding User Behavior in Job and Talent Search: An Initial Investigation In: 2017 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce, Tokyo, Japan, 11 August 2017
- Pereira-salgado, A.,Westwood, J.,Russell, L.,Ugalde, A.,Bronwen, O.,Seymour, J.,Butow, P.,Cavedon, L.,Ong, K.,Aranda, S.,Breen, S.,Kirsa, S.,Dunlevie, A.,Schofield, P. (2017). Mobile health intervention to increase oral cancer therapy adherence in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (the REMIND system): Clinical feasibility and acceptability assessment In: JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 5, 1 - 15
- Training intelligent virtual agents using human interaction data. Funded by: DIIS - Innovations Connections - Competitive from (2019 to 2020)
- Biochemical text mining for advanced chemical and pharmaceutical knowledge (Administered by The University of Melbourne). Funded by: ARC Linkage Project Grant 2016 via other University from (2018 to 2021)
- Digital Health CRC Core Participants Agreement - Umbrella Agreement. Funded by: Digital Health CRC from (2018 to 2025)
- `Natural Language Processing Supporting Clinical Reasoning`, part of Industrial Transformation Training Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies (administered by University of Melbourne). Funded by: ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre via other University Grant 2017 from (2017 to 2021)
- User-Adaptive Search and Evaluation for Complex Information-Seeking Tasks. Funded by: ARC Linkage Grant 2015 Round 1 from (2016 to 2019)
4 PhD Current Supervisions5 PhD Completions and 1 Masters by Research Completions