CS598-CXZ Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval (Spring 2005)

Announcements:

All the project reports are now available through the report page .
All posters are now available through the poster page.
Details about the posters, including a ppt template and the schedule, are now posted here.
Details about the panels are now posted here.
Details about the project progress report have now been added to the project page. The schedule is available here
Since March 3, we have been tentatively using classroom, SC 1111, because of a problem with the light switches in room SC 1214.
The grading policy has been revised with more details. See the basic information page.
Proposal grading form is ready for use now.
Project information (in particular, suggested project topics) is available now. Your project proposal is due on Feb. 22, 2005 (Tuesday).
Class Wiki is available now.
The student-nominated topics are available here.
Tentative team assignments are available here.

This course is a project-oriented graduate course designed to benefit the students who already have some background in at least one of the following areas: information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing or data mining. We will design research projects on three major application domains of information retrieval (IR) -- Web, email, and scientific literature. We broadly define IR as including all kinds of text information management tasks, such as search, classification, and mining. In the context of these research projects, students will read and present relevant current work (usually papers from major conferences), discuss their project work, and at the end, report the project work as a poster. The course has a strong bias toward applications.

Developing skills to survive, fit to, and eventually lead a research community is very important for a student. Such skills are as important as skills for doing high quality research. One important goal of this course is to involve the students in a variety of activities that often happen in real research communities, especially those involving collaborations and communications between researchers in a community.

This course will not cover the basic models/algorithms in information retrieval. Students with an interest in knowing about the general field of information retrieval should consider taking CS498CXZ/CS410 Introduction to Text Information Systems, which is expected to be offered regularly in the Fall.