Darlene LeMay Pearson Vian, 78, of Palo Alto, California passed away on February 9, 2011. Ms Vian worked at the Stanford University Medical School for over 37 years. She was Secretary of the Faculty Senate for nearly 10 years. She was hired in 1980 by Ted Shortliffe to help establish the MS/PhD program in Biomedical Informatics and soon discovered that working with students was her true calling. As Student Services Administrator, she managed recruiting, admissions, degree programs, traineeships, social events at her home, the annual retreat at Asilomar Conference Grounds, and alumni relations, including an annual alumni banquet. Perhaps her greatest contribution came as an advisor to the students, helping them deal with issues of funding, coursework, thesis writing, deciding whether to leave school early, and personal problems. She was largely responsible for the esprit and positive experience that two generations of graduate students enjoyed. As an example of her unstinting devotion, she was still consulting to the program one week before her death. In recognition of her incredible work, Ms Vian was awarded the Stanford Graduate Service Award in 1999.

A research prototype software system for conceptual information retrieval has been developed. The goal of the system, called RUBRIC, is to provide more automated and relevant access to unformatted textual databases. The approach is to use production rules from artificial intelligence to define a hierarchy of retrieval subtopics, with fuzzy context expressions and specific word phrases at the bottom. RUBRIC allows the definition of detailed queries starting at a conceptual level, partial matching of a query and a document, selection of only the highest ranked documents for presentation to the user, and detailed explanation of how and why a particular document was selected. Initial experiments indicate that a RUBRIC rule set better matches human retrieval judgment than a standard Boolean keyword expression, given equal amounts of effort in defining each. The techniques presented may be useful in stand-alone retrieval systems, front-ends to existing information retrieval systems, or real-time document filtering and routing.