Princeton University
Computer Science Dept.

Computer Science 435
Information Retrieval, Discovery, and Delivery

Andrea LaPaugh

Spring 2008
Directory
General Information | Schedule and Assignments | Project Page | Announcements

May 13, 2008:   Happy Dean's date (summer's almost here)!  The second exam has been graded.  The mean and median are 88/100.  Solutions are available (pdf).

April 19, 2008:  The solutions for the first exam are now available.

April 18, 2008:  The solutions for Assignment 5 (pdf) are now available.

April 15, 2008:  The solutions for Assignment 4 (pdf) are now available.

April 8, 2008:  The final homework assignment (#5-pdf file) is now available.  It is due Monday April 14.

April 4, 2008:  Important scheduling information
The second exam will be another take-home exam under the same rules. It will be handed out at the end of class on April 21 and will be due AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS on April 23. The time period is 46.5 hours rather than the 49 hours of exam 1, and that small difference will be taken into account in designing the exam. If you have a conflict with the exam time, please email me as soon as possible (including the person who already spoke to me - for my record).

Project check-point meetings: each of you needs to make an appointment with me during the week of April 14 to discuss your project progress AND YOUR PLANS FOR YOUR PRESENTATION.
Please schedule your appointment as soon as possible using OIT's new office hours scheduling system WASS (details below). Note that the appointment slots are 30 minutes long, but you are not obligated to use all that time - just whatever time needed to give me a summary and for us to discuss any issues. If you feel you need more time or cannot come in any of the available slots, please email me.

Presentations will be in class April 28 (5 students) and April 30 (4 students). Please sign up using WASS (details below). Note that the appointment slots are 15 minutes long, but your talk is to be 10 minutes long with a couple minutes for questions. The remaining time is buffer time to insure we finish on time. Within a given class meeting, the order in which you sign up is not important.  These are regular class meetings;  all students should be present for the full class period.

Reminder: the final homework assignment (#5) will be due Monday April 14.

Using OIT's new office hours scheduling system WASS:
Go to http://wass.princeton.edu.   Log in and click "make an appointment". My calendar has name "Andrea LaPaugh" and netid "aslp". From there it should be self-explanatory.
Appointment blocks contain several slots. At least in my view, a block is orange if no one has signed up and yellow if at least one slot is taken. I DO NOT see any indicator that all slots of a block have been taken.
Since this scheduling system is in beta-test, please also email me that you have made whichever appointment (check-point or presentation). I will keep an eye on the calendar to make sure it is not losing appointments or double-booking.

April 3, 2008:  Assignment 3, Problem 2,  Google versus Yahoo:  individual results (anonymized) and statistics are now available.  Google wins by a little.

April 1, 2008: Assignment 4 and slides used Monday are now available on the Schedule and Assignments page.

March 20, 2008:

March 12, 2008:  Solutions for Problem 1 of Assignment 2 (pdf) are now available.   Submissions for Problem 2 were generally correct.  You may have lost some points on Part a if you did not adequately justify your convergence criterion.

March 5, 2008: Solutions for Assignment 1 (pdf file) are now available.

March 4, 2008:  Deadlines announced in class yesterday:
March 3, 2008:  A list of suggestions for projects is now available on the Project Page.

March 1, 2008:  Assignment 3  now available.  Due Friday,  March 7.  Note that you must have your query for problem 2 pre-approved!

February 27, 2008: Use alpha=0.15 for Problem 2 of Assignment 2 (announced in class Monday).

February 24, 2008:  Assignment 2 (pdf) is now available.  It is due Friday, February 29.  You will also need files HW2_graph1.txt   HW2_graph2.txt  and HW2_graph3.txt

February 21, 2008:  Because we did not finish our discussion of link-based ranking and Assignment 2 addresses this material, I am postponing the due date of Assignment 2 to next Friday, February 29 (rather than February 27).  The assignment will be posted on the Schedule and Assignments page by February 23.  I will also post a summary of PageRank so that you can start working on it in advance of  class on Monday if you so choose.

February 11, 2008:  Office hours (also posted on General Information):

February 1, 2008:  Welcome to COS 435.  Due to a clerical error, the registrar had cos435 scheduled to meet for only  two 50-minute classes per week.  We need to extend our MW times by 20 minutes or add another 50-minute meeting.  I  have emailed all students who were pre-registered for the course.  We will straighten this out during the first week of classes.  In the meantime, the registrar now lists the class as MW 1:30-2:50 (the intended times), which will be the time if we cannot resolve the conflicts of all students currently registered (and me) by meeting at some other time.  Andrea LaPaugh
A.S. LaPaugh  last revised Tue May 13 11:01  EDT 2008