CS 6210: Course Details

Quick Links: [ Home ] [ IVLE ] [ Project Info ] [ Schedule ] [ Details ] [ HW 1 ] [ HW 2 ]

Why teach this course? Many of today's CS and IS graduates will work alongside information providers in industry and academia that often have little or no computing background or experience. Conversely, many CS/IS graduates may not understand the particularities of the needs of such employers.

This topics course is designed to complement CS 4246/5246 Text processing on the web and CS 3240 Human computer interaction, by giving students a wide variety of applications of computing in the humanities and libraries. The module teaches the fundamental concepts of information retrieval and branches away from the curriculum taught by CS 4246 to examine the applications of modern information retrieval technology in the context of the traditional library and in the converging field of digital libraries and archives.

Prerequisites: CS2103 Software Engineering is required for the course. Students are encouraged to have taken or concurrently take CS 4246 Text processing on the web, CS 3240 Human computer interaction, IT 1003 Information Systems Applications, but none of the courses are required. The course is open to both CS and IS students. If you don't meet the requirements for the course, but you have a strong interest in learning the material, you may approach me if you'd still like to enroll.

Aims and Objectives

Modes of Learning

(Updated Thu Jul 24 14:15:05 GMT-8 2003)

Lectures and class participation will be used for the first half of the course. The first half will cover fundamentals of information retrieval and digital library standards, as well as furnish the students with a wide variety of topics of current interests to information professions in academic and industry.

Survey paper. By the third week of the course, students will have selected one topic (from a controlled list) to write up a survey paper on, using papers suggested by the lecturer and through their own information gathering.

Mini lecture presentation. Based on the topic of your survey paper, you will be grouped into small teams to present the material on the papers in your survey. These lectures will be in the last three sessions of our regular class schedule. Lectures will be 15 minutes long (about 5-8 slides), with five minutes for questions.

Project. After the survey, students will work on a particular project topic for further study, either individually or in groups of two or three. Students can either propose projects to me or choose from a list of topics. Our last class will feature a poster presentation (open to the public) which will allow the SoC staff and students to see the efforts of your work. Information on choosing a topic for the final project is given here.

N. B. - I know students are sometimes at a loss on how to assess their progress in a course due to lags in instructors or tutors returning assessment to them. I will try my best to grade work within two weeks of receiving the homework assignments.

Textbook and Required Readings

Required:

Recommended:

(Updated Thu Jul 24 14:07:58 GMT-8 2003) I have put a number of books that will be relevant to your project work in the RBR.
Click here to see the current books on reserve and their status.

We will also be reading selected papers from a number of relevant conference papers to give you an idea of the current state-of-the-art. You will be reading a number of additional papers as part of the survey paper.

Assessment

(Updated Thu Jul 24 14:15:05 GMT-8 2003)

Your grade will be assessed on your performance in the following criteria:

Homeworks: 20%
Class participation: 10%
Survey Paper: 20%
Class Presentation: 10%
Final Project: Presentation 5%
Write-Up / Deliverables 35%

Grades in group projects will be subject to peer grading. You will be asked to assess each other's level of effort in your project works and graded accordingly.

Academic Honesty Policy

(Updated Thu Jul 24 14:15:05 GMT-8 2003)

Collaboration is a very good thing. Students are encouraged to work together and some programming projects will require a team effort with everyone expected to contribute.

On the other hand, cheating is considered a very serious offense. Please don't do it! Concern about cheating creates an unpleasant environment for everyone.

So how do you draw the line between collaboration and cheating? Here's a reasonable set of ground-rules. Failure to understand and follow these rules will constitute cheating, and will be dealt with as per University guidelines.

You should already be familiar with the University's academic code. If you haven't yet, read it now.

This section on academic honesty is adapted from Surendar Chandra's course at the University of Georgia, who in turn acknowledges Prof. Carla Ellis and Prof. Amin Vahdat at Duke University for his policy formulation. The Gilligan's Island rule origin is uncertain, but at least can be traced back to Prof. Dymond at York University's use of it in 1984.

Critical research reading and writing skills

By the middle of this course, you should be able to exercise good critical research reading and writing skills. Review your course handouts from the Orientation lecture on these skills. There's a lot of help out there for these skills but here are two that are good starting points:

Quick Links: [ Home ] [ IVLE ] [ Project Info ] [ Schedule ] [ Details ] [ HW 1 ] [ HW 2 ]


Min-Yen Kan <kanmy@comp.nus.edu.sg>
Created on: Wed May 7 16:22:19 2003 | Version: 1.0 | Last modified: Thu Oct 2 18:53:03 2003