Hugh Williams

Enterprise Professor

Hugh Williams is the Melbourne Business School's first Melbourne Enterprise Professor.

Hugh joined MBS from Google, where he was a Vice President and led Google Maps' worldwide product and engineering teams.

He has also held technical executive roles at eBay, Microsoft, Tinder, and Pivotal. Prior to his move to the US, he was the Associate Professor in Information Retrieval at RMIT University and CEO of his own start-up.

He has a PhD in Computer Science from RMIT University, and has published over 120 works including over 33 US patents and two books. He is best known for his work on search engines and for inventing infinite scroll.

Hugh sits on the Board of the State Library Victoria and advises Domain (AUS), Doordash (US), Expert360 (AUS), Moonpig (UK), and Ocado (UK). He is also a Venture Partner at Rampersand and a mentor at Startmate. He is also the co-founder of CS in Schools, a philanthropic venture that helps teachers teach coding in secondary schools.


Most Notable Research

Julia H. Farago, Hugh E. Williams, James E. Walsh, Nick Whyte, Kavi Goel, Philip Fung, Ariel Lazier, Kenneth A. Moss, Ethan N. Ray. Object Search UI and Dragging Object Results, United States Patent 7,664,739 and European Patent Application EP1984854 and WIPO Patent Application WO/2007/094902, 2010.

Hugh E. Williams, Xian-Sheng Hua, Hong-Qiao Li, Xiaodong Fan, Richard Qian. Forming a Representation of a Video Item and Use Thereof, United States Patent 8,503,523, 2013.

Falk Scholer, Hugh E. Williams, John Yiannis, and Justin Zobel. Compression of inverted indexes for fast query evaluation. In Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR '02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 222-229, 2002.

Hugh E. Williams Justin Zobel. Compressing Integers for Fast File Access. The Computer Journal, Volume 42, Issue 3, 1 January 1999, Pages 193–201, 1999.

Andrew Turpin, Yohannes Tsegay, David Hawking, and Hugh E. Williams. Fast generation of result snippets in web search. In Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-134, 2007.