1. CSCI 572: Information Retrieval and Search Engines: Summer 2010
Prof. Chris A. Mattmann

2. The Class
Will give you a complete treatment of the area of search engines and information retrieval
The fundamental building blocks of the web and search engines
The Search Engine Architecture proposed by Brin/Page
Understanding algorithms for ranking pages
Understanding technologies for characterizing, downloading, parsing, indexing, searching and disseminating web content
Advanced topics in search engines such as BigData and distributed computation
Will equip you with the necessary skills to design complex, real-world search engines

3. General class information
Lecture, but…
You can participate
You should participate
You will participate, that is, if you want to do well :)
Breakdown of points
20% participation
40% research paper presentation
40% course project

4. General class information
Syllabus/website:
Visit it often, as the schedule may change!
This is where all of your course project info and presentation info will be posted
This site will point you to required reading (research papers), and to lectures that you can download before class

5. What we’ll cover Theory Practice
Understanding of basic information retrieval
Search engine querying
Search engine ranking
Architecture of search engines and technologies
Design Patterns
Practice
Modern search engine technologies from Apache

6. Course Presentation
Each week, we’ll read a few research papers on search engines
For the first part of the course (5 weeks), I’ll lecture on the general topics that the research papers cover
The search engine architecture: fetching, parsing, indexing, querying, distributed computation, etc.
For the last part of the course (~5 weeks), each one of you will present on one of the research papers we covered in the first 5 weeks

7. Course Presentation
What I’m looking for (~20 minutes of presentation, with ~5 mins questions at the end)
You understood the paper
Discussion of related work and background
Discussion of why should I care about the topic
And more importantly why your fellow classmates should care
Relation of your paper to the lecture slides I gave on the topic
Simple summarization and description of the algorithm and/or technology introduced in the paper
What were the results/contributions/conclusions of the paper
Your evaluation of Pros of the paper
Your evaluation of Cons of the paper

8. Course Presentation What I’m NOT looking for
Plagiarism
Repetition
Cutting/Pasting out of the paper
Regurgitation
You to follow the EXACT set of bullets that I gave on the prior slide
You should be looking to be innovative – show the class and me that you really understood what was in the paper
Treat it like a conference presentation

9. Course Project
You will get to leverage one or a combination of several Apache software technologies
Nutch, Tika, Lucene, Solr, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Cassandra, etc.
You will make a significant contribution to one or more of the above communities
Deliverables
A 2 page project proposal
A 2 page mid-term project report
Source code and final demonstration to me at end of class

10. Course Project Deliverables Your project proposal should include:
Demonstration that you’ve researched your particular idea with pointers to issue trackers and mailing lists
Objectives section
Approach section
Identification of deliverables section
Timeline/Schedule
Your mid term report should include:
Current status
Blockers to completion
Planned mitigation to blockers

11. Me Graduated with my Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC in 2007
Advisor: Dr. Nenad Medvidovic
Was a student at USC from
B.S., Computer Science 2001
M.S., Computer Science 2003
My research interests
The intersection of software architectures, and large-scale data dissemination
Software connector selection
Bayesian decision theory
Reinforcement learning
Search Engines

12. So…today Quick lecture on characterizing the web
Read the papers linked from the syllabus
Be ready for next Tuesday as this is a 10-week course and we are going to dive in