Mathematics of Search Engines

David Killen, GCHQ

Wednesday 11th May 2005, 6:30 pm

(Please note that this talk will be preceded by a short Annual General Meeting of the BCS Edinburgh Branch at 6:15 pm. Refreshments will be available from just after 6:00 pm)

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, 36 York Place, Edinburgh EH1 3HU (street map)

David Killen's talk will cover how search engines are evaluated in the TREC competition and compare the mathematics behind commercial and academic search engines. The emphasis will be on breadth rather than depth and will skim over the HITS algorithm, Google's pagerank algorithm and latent semantic indexing.

About the speaker

David Killen graduated in Mathematics from Warwick University in 1971 and did post-grad research in algebraic topology. He joined the scientific civil service and stayed there throughout his career apart from a sabbatical to get a Masters in Computer Science from Birmingham University.