Please note that Professor Marti Hearst is an author or co-author of many of the lectures and assignments that will be given this term.

Readings refer to Modern Information Retrieval (MIR) or The Organization of Information (OI), or to papers in the reader. Readings are meant to be read in advance of the lecture for which they are shown.

This schedule is subject to change. 


Go directly to the current week....

Week 1

Tuesday, August 27

Lecture: Course Overview (RRL)
Reading: Borges, Dennett, and Reddy
Assignment 1: What is Information? (due Aug 29)

Thursday, August 29    (assignment 1 is due)

Lecture: What is Information? History of Information Search and Organization, and Photo Project Introduction (MED & RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 1, 3
Optional reading: Data Powers of Ten  A Question of Scale  The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet

Tuesday, September 3

Lecture: Cognition, Culture, and Categories (MED)
Readings: Chapters 1 - 3 from George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
Assignment 2:  Photo Use Scenario (due Sept. 12)
Related Docs:  Brainstorming;  Storyboarding


Thursday, September 5

Lecture: Artificial Intelligence, Ontologies, and Common Sense (MED)
Readings:  The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication (G. W. Furnas, T. K. Landauer, L. M. Gomez, S. T. Dumais);  Commonsense-Based Interfaces (M. Minsky);  CYC: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure (D. B. Lenat)
Optional reading:  A Framework for Representing Knowledge (M. Minsky);  CYC: Toward Programs with Common Sense (D. B. Lenat, R. V. Guha, K. Pittman, D. Pratt, M. Shepherd)

Tuesday, September 10

Lecture: Metadata Intro (RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 3 & 5


Thursday, September 12    (assignment 2 is due)

Lecture: Controlled Vocabularies Introduction (RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 6-7; Unanswered Questions in the Design of Controlled Vocabularies (E. Svenonius); Why Are Online Catalogs Still Hard to Use? (C. L. Borgman); Subject Access in Online Catalogs: A Design Model (M. J. Bates)
Assignment 3: Photo Metadata Design (due Sept. 19)

Tuesday, September 17

Lecture: Multimedia Information Organization and Retrieval (MED)
Readings: MIR 6.5;  Computational Media Aesthetics: Finding Meaning Beautiful (C. Dorai, S. Venkatesh),  The Holy Grail of Content-Based Media Analysis (S. Chang),  Indexing the Content of Multimedia Documents (S. W. Smoliar, L. D. Wilcox)
Optional reading:  Defining Multimedia (H. Purchase);  Video Handling with Music and Speech Detection (K. Minami, A. Akutsu, H. Hamada, Y. Tonomura);  Applications of Video-Content Analysis and Retrieval (N. Dimitrova, H. Zhang, B. Shahraray, I. Sezan, T. Huang, A. Zakhor);  An Overview of Audio Information Retrieval (J. Foote);  FotoFile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System (A. Kuchinsky, C. Pering, M. L. Creech, D. Freeze, B. Serra, J. Gwizdka)

Thursday, September 19    (assignment 3 is due)

Lecture: Metadata for Motion Pictures: Media Streams (MED)
Readings:  Media Streams: An Iconic Visual Language for Video Representation (M. Davis);  Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology (M. Davis)
Optional reading:  IDIC: Assembling Video Sequences from Story Plans and Content Annotations (M. Davis, W. Sack);  Media Streams: Representing Video for Retrieval and Repurposing (M. Davis)
Assignment 4:   Revision of Photo Metadata Design and Project Presentation (due Sept. 26; part due Sept. 23)

Tuesday, September 24

Lecture: Metadata for Motion Pictures: MPEG-7 (MED)
Readings:  MPEG-7 (Part 1) (J. M. Martinez, R. Koenen, F. Pereira);  MPEG-7 (Part 2) (J. Martinez)
Optional reading:  Everything You Wanted to Know About MPEG-7: Part 1 (F. Nack, A. T. Lindsay);  Everything You Wanted to Know About MPEG-7: Part 2 (F. Nack, A. T. Lindsay);  Multimedia Standards: Building Blocks of the Web (L. Rutledge);  SMIL 2.0 (Part 1) (D. C. A. Bulterman);  SMIL 2.0 (Part 2) (D. C. A. Bulterman)


Thursday, September 26    (assignment 4 is due)

Lecture: Photo Project Presentations (MED)
Assignment 5:  Metadata Consolidation (tasks due Sept. 27, Oct. 9 and Oct. 10) <-- Revised date! Revised assignment doc!

Tuesday, October 1

Lecture: XML and "Document Engineering" (Guest Lecturer: Bob Glushko); Prof. Davis' intro slides
Readings: From A Technical Introduction to XML (Norm Walsh, October 13, 1998, xml.com), read specifically: "What is XML", "What do XML Documents Look Like?" [don't stress over this -- read it lightly], and "Validity"; What is XSLT? (Ken Holman, XML.com, August 16, 2000) [read as much of this as you can, but at least through section 1.1.5.1]; XML Standards and Specifications for Interoperable E-commerce (Bob Glushko) [read as much of this as you can, but at least through "Horizontal Content Standards"]


Thursday, October 3

Lecture: Thesaurus Design and Construction (RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 7 (review); "Flow of Work in the Construction of Indexing Languages and Thesauri" (D. Soergel); ISO 2788 "Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri"; ISO 5963 "Methods for examining documents, determining their subjects, and selecting indexing terms."
Thesaurus Examples Shown in Class: ERIC, the Educational Resources Information Center (view 1, view 2, view 3, view 4, view 5); MeSH, Medical Subject Headings (view 1, view 2, view 3, view 4); AAT, Art & Architecture Thesaurus (view 1, view 2); LCSH, Library of Congress Subject Headings (view 1); Dewey Decimal Classification (view 1); Library of Congress Classification - TH, "Building Construction" (view 1, view 2).

Tuesday, October 8

Lecture: Metadata and Markup (RRL)
Readings: XML Black Book, Chapter 5 (handout)


Thursday, October 10    (assignment 5 is due)

Lecture: Photo Project Review (MED)
Assignment 6:  Photo Annotation (due Nov. 26) <-- Another ever-so-slightly revised version (as of 10/27/02)!

Tuesday, October 15

Lecture: Database Design (RRL)


Thursday, October 17

Lecture: Database Design - Normalization and SQL (RRL)
Readings: Handouts: "The ER Model: Basic Concepts" (T. J. Teorey); "Logical Database Design and the Relational Model" (F. R. McFadden, J. A. Hoffer)
Assignment 7:  Database Design (due Oct. 24)

Tuesday, October 22

Lecture: Introduction to IR and the Search Process (RRL)
Readings: Handouts: "Word Sense Disambiguation and Information Retrieval" (D. Jurafsky & J. Martin); "Tasks and Socio-Cognitive Relevance: A Specific Example" (B. Hjorland, F. S. Christensen). MIR Ch. 1.


Thursday, October 24     (assignment 7 is due)

Lecture: Boolean Queries and Text Processing (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 2
Assignment 8: Lexis-Nexis/Dialog Search (due Oct. 31)

Monday, October 28

Special Session: A workshop that will cover how the mathematics that appear in some of the IR readings actually translate into operations and algorithms. From 10:30-12:00 in room 107, South Hall

Tuesday, October 29

Lecture: Statistical Properties of Text (RRL)
Readings: TBA


Thursday, October 31    (assignment 8 is due)

Lecture: Vector Representation (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 7; MIR Ch. 2; from reader: "Getting Beyond Boole" (W.S. Cooper), "How to Ues Controlled Vocabularies More Effectively in Online Searching" (M. J. Bates)
Assignment 9: Zipf Assignment (due Nov. 7)
 

Tuesday, November 5

Lecture: Probabilistic Ranking and Relevance Feedback (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 2 & 7; Cheshire II: Designing a Next-Generation Online Catalog (R. Larson, J. McDonough, P. O'Leary, L. Kuntz)


Thursday, November 7     (assignment 9 is due)

Lecture: Lexical Relations and WordNet (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 7; Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database -- Introduction & Ch. 1 (C. Fellbaum, G.A. Miller)
Assignment 10: Ranking (due Nov. 21)

Tuesday, November 12

Lecture: Evaluation (RRL) 
Readings: MIR Ch. 3; An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness (Blair & Maron); A Case for Interaction: A Study of Interactive Information Retrieval Behavior and Effectiveness (Koeneman & Belkin)


Thursday, November 14

Lecture: Web Search Issues and Algorithms (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 13; The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Brin & Page); Mercator: A Scalable, Extensible Web Crawler (Heydon & Najork)
Assignment 11: TBA (due Dec. 3)

Tuesday, November 19

Lecture: Interfaces for Information Retrieval I (MED)
Readings: MIR Ch. 10.1 - 10.4 "As We May Think" (V. Bush; The Atlantic Monthly; July 1945, Volume 176, No. 1, pages 101-108); "Why Interfaces Don't Work" (D.A. Norman, In: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Ed. Brenda Laurel, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1991, pages 209--219.)
Optional reading: "Memex II" (V. Bush; J.M. Nyce and P. Kahn, editors, From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, pages 165--184, Academic Press, San Diego, Ca., 1991); "Memex: Getting Back on the Trail" (Tim Oren; J.M. Nyce and P. Kahn, editors, From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, pages 319--338; Academic Press, San Diego, Ca., 1991)


Thursday, November 21    (assignment 10 is due)

Lecture: Interfaces for Information Retrieval II (MED)
Readings: MIR Ch. 10.5 - 10.10

Tuesday, November 26    (assignment 6 is due)

Lecture: Web Search Architecture and Crawling (Guest Speaker Avi Rappoport)
Readings: None
Optional Extra Credit Assignment #1: Metadata (worth up to 40 extra points; due Dec. 13)
Optional Extra Credit Assignment #2: IR Evaluation (worth up to 30 extra points; due Dec. 13)
Optional Extra Credit Assignment #3: Research Paper (worth up to 30 extra points; due Dec. 13)


Thursday, November 28

No Class -- Happy Thanksgiving!
 

Tuesday, December 3     

Lecture: Information Architecture and Web Site Design
Readings: None


Thursday, December 5

Lecture: Final Review - study guide (RRL)

Friday, Dec 13, 9:30am - 12:30pm