Name: INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN NETWORKED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS
Number: 16:198:672:01
Index: 43068
Instructors: Haym Hirsh (Computer Science) and Paul Kantor (SCILS)
Time: Spring, 1995, Thursdays 6:30-9:30pm
Location: Hill Center (Busch Campus), Room 423
Credits: 3
The proliferation of computers and computer networks is creating
an environment in which there is far more information available
than is possible to access or comprehend. The development of
tools for structuring, locating, abstracting, and otherwise
accessing information with minimal user effort is becoming
crucial as we move to a network-based information society. This
course focuses on the scientific problems underlying the search,
retrieval, and exploration of digital information in distributed
computing environments. The emphasis will be on the central
ideas and research issues underlying these problems, and on
preparing students to work in these areas.
The goal of this course is to provide the background that will
enable students to develop tools for the (quickly approaching)
future in which computers are ubiquitous, data are being
generated and saved at incredible rates, and all kinds of people
will want quick and easy access to information.
The format of the course will be lecture/discussion. Although
students from all disciplines are welcome, sophistication with basic
concepts in computer science will be assumed. Students will be
expected to complete reading and homework assignments. Each student
will select one of the papers to be discussed and will lead the
discussion of that paper. Students will prepare term papers reviewing
current developments in a subfield of particular interest. Working in
teams, students will select and complete a prototype development task
arising from the issues addressed in the course.
Topics:
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Text retrieval:
Basics of text representation
Terms and strings as features
Query languages and executions
Similarity measures
Scoring functions
Logical structure of queries
Inference schemes
Natural language
Data fusion
Information acquisition:
Exploration/browsing tools, ftp, mosaic, catalog search
Issues of compression, security and authentication, document representations
Information filtering
Intelligent agents for finding information
Other media:
Media types
Features: media dependent, media independent,
endogenous vs exogenous features
Problems and issues
Evaluation criteria:
Effectiveness
Precision and recall
User criteria: time, cost, cumulated utility, marginal utility
Interactions with users:
Interfaces for retrieval/display
Mental models
Other topics based on class interest, such as:
Security and authentication, post-relational databases, image
analysis/image sequence analysis, specific media, version control,
new technologies, etc.
Please contact the instructors, Haym Hirsh (hirsh@cs.rutgers.edu) and
Paul Kantor (kantorp@cs.rutgers.edu), for additional information.
Class work includes small programming assignments called "bricks" My bricks are in ~paffy/672: brick1 and brick2. You can view the bricks for our team or run them from ~orost/672. One of the programming assignments was to put together a home page and highlight a link. For nice pictures and assorted other stuff, see America's Cup
Our team is also working together on a project: description prototype. Possible IR tools - test test only
In addition, each team is responsible for presenting one of the six NSF digital library projects to the class. Our team will be presenting about Stanford. For more detail on the digital library projects watch this page... Related information can be found in stanfords tech reports. Another link mentioned in the newsgroup is xerox. Revisiting these links at a later date, I found a List of Collections that has something for everyone.