Rate My Professor Alistair Moffat

Alistair Moffat is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. He completed a BSc (Honours) in 1979 and a PhD in 1986, both from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Appointed Professor of Computer Science in 2002, he previously served as Head of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Moffat has supervised numerous postgraduate students, including over 25 PhD completions, and has taught programming to more than 25,000 undergraduates during his four decades in academia. His career includes roles such as Joint Program Committee Chair for the ACM SIGIR Conference in 2005.

Moffat's research specializations encompass text and index compression, source coding methods including Huffman, arithmetic, and ANS coding, text indexing and index construction, and information retrieval heuristics, with a focus on retrieval effectiveness evaluation and top-k query processing. He has co-authored more than 250 research papers and several influential books, including Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images (1994 and 1999, with Justin Zobel), Compression and Coding Algorithms (2002), and Programming, Problem Solving, and Abstraction with C (2003, revised edition 2013). His contributions have had significant impact in the fields of information retrieval and data compression, evidenced by his induction into the SIGIR Academy in 2021, delivery of the keynote at the ACM SIGIR Conference in 2022, election as an ACM Fellow in 2025 for contributions to the implementation and evaluation of search engines, the 2006 Australian Carrick Institute Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, and the 2026 CORE Distinguished Service Award.