Johanne Trippas

Dr Johanne Trippas is a Vice-Chancellor’s 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.

She has extensive experience analysing human information-seeking behaviour and developing novel approaches to personalised intelligent assistance, data-driven modelling, and profiling human behaviours. Trippas employs many research methods and consistently adopts user-centric data capture and analysis approaches, focusing on modelling and profiling human behaviours.

Additionally, she is a member of the NIST TREC program committee, ACM CHIIR steering committee member, and SIGIR Artifact Evaluation Committe Vice-chair. Trippas serves on numerous information retrieval events, such as SWRIL’25’, general chair (ACM CUI’24), workshop chair (ACM CHIIR’25), tutorial chair (ECIR’24), and proceedings chair (ACM SIGIR-AP’23, CUI’23).


She completed her PhD in Computer Science investigating Conversational Systems at RMIT University in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Lawrence Cavedon, Professor Mark Sanderson, and Doctor Damiano Spina. Her PhD investigated how people interact with novel voice-only search systems, aiming to make information more accessible, modelling activity and speech patterns, and establishing new research directions for this unique interaction mode. During her PhD, she developed a novel interaction model for Spoken Conversational Search through a unique multi-methods analysis. She was awarded the RMIT University Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s Higher Degree by Research Prize for her doctoral work and thesis.

Previously, she was a Doreen Thomas Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Professional interests:

• Member of the RMIT Research Centre for Information Discovery and Data Analytics (CIDDA).
• SIGIR Artifact Evaluation Committee vice-chair.
• ACM CHIIR Steering Committee member.
• Program Committee member for several conferences, including ACM SIGIR, ACM CIKM, ACM CHIIR, and CUI.

Industry collaborations:

• Ambulance Victoria
• Google
• Microsoft
• Booking.com
• Amazon