Princeton University Computer Science Dept.

Computer Science 598b Advanced Topics in Computer Science Digital Information Access Andrea LaPaugh

Spring 1999

General Information

Meeting time: Tues, Thurs 3:00--4:20 PM (NOT changed though thought might)
Meeting place: Room 102 CS building
First meeting: Tuesday, February 2, 1998, 3:00 pm in Room 102 CS building.
Extra meetings: We may need to make up a class or two that we miss due to my schedule. Therefore, we may have a class during reading period.
There will be a meeting at the end of reading period for 10-minute project reports.

Professor: Andrea LaPaugh, 304 CS Building, 258-4568, aslp@cs.princeton.edu,
Office hours by appointment. Please send email.

Course secretary: Sandra Barbu, 323 CS building, 258-4562, barbu@cs.princeton.edu

Course Description

During the 1990's there has been a tremendous expansion in the amount of information available in digital form, both through the Web and in library collections. Both the Web and large digital library collections present similar problems in the management and retrieval of information. How do the providers of search and data organization services give useful access to information? Some of the questions are sociological; many are technical. This course will study the state of the art of information access for large digital collections.

This course will cover similar material to that covered last spring in COS598b: Information Access: Issues for the Web & Digital Libraries. However, the selection of readings will be different and the students will engage in more experimental work. Students who participated in COS598b last spring are welcome to come as non-credit participants to those meeting that discuss new material.

Readings

Course Requirements for Credit

• Presentation of papers from the research literature.
• several homework and laboratory exercises exploring aspects of information access
• A final project to be designed by the student in consultation with the instructor.

Prerequisites

The seminar is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Undergraduates who wish to take this seminar should have had at least one upper-level undergraduate computer science course that required the completion of a large project. Graduate students in areas other than computer science or computer engineering should have a strong background in computer science fundamentals.

Please contact Professor LaPaugh with any questions.

Sample topics:

• indexing, hashing, basic searching
• issues of handling large data collections
• document ranking and comparison
• semantic-based search enhancement
• spiders and resource gathering
• interoperability of digital collections
• communication issues for remote access
• information reliability and permanence
• information summarization
• multimedia
• digital publishing
• methods of evaluation

On Reserve at Engineering Library

• Lesk, Michael, Practical Digital Libraries San Francisco, Ca.: Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.
  There will be assigned reading from this text.
• Salton, Gerard, Automatic text processing: the transformation, analysis, and retrieval of information by computer Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988.
  This text is supplementary. I do not expect to assign reading from it.
• Frakes, William and Baeza-Yates, Ricardo, editors, Information Retrieval: Data Structures and Algorithms Prentice Hall, 1992.
  This text is a good reference for fundamental algorithms in information retrieval.

Course tools

There are home-grown tools available for experimentation during the course and final projects. Documentation is online.

WWW Resources