Linux Users of Victoria, Inc.

• Sarvnaz Karimi - Find it all: how biomedical search engines should work!
• Julien Goodwin - How the internet works

How the internet works by Julien Goodwin

Most developers of web or other network reliant code have a basic understanding of networking, but as data rates and usage continue to increase complexity has been increasing alongside them.

This presentation will cover some of the technical complexity inherent in today's Internet, such as BGP, routing registries, Anycast and Multicast. It will also provide a background of the economic realities of routing, the how's and why's of peering, transit and customer agreements.

Julien is a former LUV secretary and long time member. In his day job he manages educational networks with millions of users and works with teams of developers making custom educational software.

Find it all: how biomedical search engines should work! by Sarvnaz Karimi

Complicated Boolean retrieval is still the dominant search paradigm in the clinical and biomedical domains. Nurses, medical students and medical researchers are trained to formulate Boolean queries for their daily search in biomedical texts, and if they fail to find any relevant information, health librarians may come to their rescue. Sometimes, however, finding any relevant evidence is difficult, even for expert users of the existing systems (such as PubMed or Ovid MEDLINE). In this talk, I'll first review basics on search engines and their types; and second I'll introduce some of the research problems and results from our research group at National ICT Australia on improving search in biomedical literature. Our research outcomes address two main problems that have made it challenging for any alternative approach to complicated Boolean retrieval to be practical: (1) focused information needs which are hard to formulate, because a query should cover multiple criteria that need to be satisfied for a relevant research article to be retrieved; and (2) strict requirement for finding all the existing evidence.

Sarvnaz is a postdoctoral research fellow at NICTA Victoria research laboratory located at the University of Melbourne. The main focus of her current research is domain specific text information retrieval for biomedical texts. She completed her PhD in computer science in the field of machine transliteration at RMIT University.