What's going on

JCDL 2025, the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, will take place as a fully virtual event in December 2025. I'm happy to be one of the programme chairs. We are still calling for papers!

I'm happy to announce that our paper "Multimodal RAG Enhanced Visual Descriptions", mainly led and conducted by my former PhD student Amit Kumar Jaiswal and a collaboration with Haiming Liu, has been accepted as ACM CIKM 2025 short paper! 🎉
The paper introduces an approach for generating textual descriptions of images, e.g, for captioning. It focuses on addressing the modality gap – a misalignment between textual and visual representations in a common embedding space, which is a significant challenge in pre-trained large multimodal models (LMMs). A RAG approach is proposed because fine-tuning models to mitigate this gap is often expensive and impractical due to the need for extensive, domain-specific data.
A preprint is available on arXiv: arXiv:2500.09170.

ELLIS ESSIR 2025, the European Summer School on Information Retrieval, took place in Wolverhampton, UK, July 7-11. The mission of the school is to enable students to learn about modern research challenges and methods on IR and related disciplines like AI and NLP.



About me

I am Full Professor (Universitätsprofessor) and Head of School of Applied Data Science at Modul University Vienna, Austria. Furthermore, I am Adjunct Professor (Lehrbeauftragter) at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. With a general interest in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI), my focus is on human-centric Information Retrieval, generative AI and its application in disciplines such as Digital Libraries. I am chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS-IRSG). I was general chair of ACM CIKM 2023 and I am programme chair of ACM JCDL 2025. I was chair of the ELLIS ESSIR 2025 European Summer School on Information Retrieval.

Before joining Modul University, I was Reader (Associate Professor equivalent) in Data Science in the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. I was the head and founder of the Data Science, AI, Information Retrieval and NLP research group DAIREL.Prior to this, I was Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK. I was a member of the Information Retrieval group at the School of Computing Science of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow. Before I was working in the Information Systems Working Group at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Duisburg-Essen, where I did my PhD on information modelling and retrieval based on user annotations. Before joining the group in Duisburg, I worked at Fraunhofer IPSI on annotation-based retrieval in Digital Humanities.

I hold a PhD from the University of Duisburg-Essen and Diploma (Diplom-Informatiker, MSc equivalent) in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund. I am a BCS Fellow as well as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

OMINOI am the PI of the EU Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska Curie Staff Exchange project OMINO (Overcoming Multilevel INformation Overload). In this project, we apply information retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation and generative AI to tackle information overload. Quartz ITN I was the University of Bedfordshire's Principal Investigator of the EU H2020 Innovative Training Network QUARTZ (Quantum Information Access and Retrieval Theory), which is concerned with formal approaches to Information Access and Retrieval based on the quantum mechanical framework. Furthermore, I have been leading and working in several national and international research and knowledge transfer projects.


Research Interests

The aim of my main lines of research is to tackle information overload (see our Nature Human Behaviour article) by supporting users in finding relevant information in large data collections more effectively. To this end, I utilise my Computer Science background and amalgamate methods from AI, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Information Science, NLP and Data Science. I employ cognitive and human-centric theories and combine these with mathematical modelling (e.g., quantum mechanical models), (generative) AI, machine learning and embedding models to bring the human into the loop.

In particular, I have been working on the following topics (links lead to peer-reviewed example papers):

Please contact me if you are interested in a BSc, MSc or PhD project in these areas.


Research/Knowledge Transfer Projects

I have been PI and been involved in several national and international research and knowledge transfer projects.

Research Projects

Knowledge Transfer Projects


Research Supervision

Completed PhD Projects

Completed MSc by Research Projects


Teaching

I was the coordinator of the MSc Computer Science and Data Science and MSc Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence online MSc Programmes at the University of Wolverhampton.

I was the coordinator of the BSc (Hons) Information and Data Systems, BSc (Hons) Information Systems and BSc (Hons) Data Science courses/programmes during my time at the University of Bedfordshire.

Topics I have been teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level comprise:


Research-related Activities

Some of my research-related activities include:

Short Bio & CV

Short Bio (to copy&paste)

[Profile Picture]
Prof. Dr. Ingo Frommholz is Professor and Head of the School of Applied Data Science at Modul University Vienna, Austria, and Adjunct Professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences. His research focuses on interactive information retrieval, quantum-inspired models, AI and deep learning, natural language processing, retrieval-augmented generation, and bibliometric-enhanced retrieval, with applications ranging from scholarly information access, digital humanities and scientometrics to cyberstalking detection. He has been Principal Investigator of major international projects such as the EU Horizon Europe OMINO project on information overload and the EU H2020 QUARTZ project on quantum-inspired information access, with a funding portfolio exceeding 5 million EUR. Ingo is Chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group, Senior Managing Editor of the International Journal on Digital Libraries (Springer), and serves on the steering committees of leading ACM conferences including CIKM and SIGIR-ICTIR. He has published more than 100 scholarly works, supervised and examined PhD students across Europe, and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) as well as the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).


Trivia

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