To take up an appointment as full time Chief Scientist with enterprise search company Funnelback, Dr David Hawking, leading research scientist, has formally departed CSIRO. As part of a highly successful project within the CSIRO, Dr. Hawking founded the Funnelback technology in 1998. He has carried out his Chief Scientist role with the company in a part time capacity while on secondment from CSIRO, since the establishment of Funnelback Pty Ltd in 2005 to commercialise the technology.

During his 10 years at CSIRO and is keen to continue his research at Funnelback, Dr. Hawking published a series of world class papers in the field of information retrieval.

Dr. Hawking is a member of the editorial board for the Information Retrieval journal (INRT). Including an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchatel and the 2005 Chris Wallace prize for Australasian Computer Science Research by the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia, he has won a number of honours and awards. He holds the position of Adjunct Professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University and will continue to supervise Phd students there and at the University of Sydney.

Dr. Hawking will continue to contribute to product development and innovation at Funnelback. His work on: search evaluation in realistic contexts, improvement of search through the exploitation of context, enterprise/intranet search, distributed search techniques, personal search and search efficiency will continue.

Funnelback offers Web and Enterprise Search Engine solutions. The Funnelback search engine has a world class result ranking algorithm, which can be tuned to the specific information retrieval needs of its clients. The technology is used on a daily basis by organizations such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Westpac Banking Corporation, the Australian Government, the Australian Securities Exchange, CareerOne and ninemsn.