Week	Date	Topic	Reading	Assignment
1	1/13	Course introduction		Chapter 1 Overall Introduction Chapter 2 History - General Remarks (pages 9-14) Joyce and Needham, The Thesaurus Approach to Information Retrieval (pages 15 - 20) First surface look at Maron, On Relevance, Probabalistic Indexing and Information Retrieval (page 39 - 46)   -- This will be a reading for the following week, but browse through it and get a general idea of what it is about.
2	1/20			Martin Luther King holiday.  University closed
3	1/27			Maron, On Relevance, Probabalistic Indexing and Information Retrieval other TBD
4	2/3
5	2/10
6	2/17
7	2/24
Break	3/3			Spring Break
8	3/10
9	3/17
10	3/24
11	3/31
12	4/7
13	4/14
14	4/21
15	4/28	Conference style presentation of projects Attendance and active participation by all students at all sessions required  Abstracts of presentations will be available at least one week ahead of time.  There will be demonstrations of the working projects, and questions, suggestions from the audience
16	5/5	Conference style presentation of projects continues Attendance and active participation by all students at all sessions required  Abstracts of presentations will be available at least one week ahead of time.  There will be demonstrations of the working projects, and questions, suggestions from the audience

Web pages created by class members:

Text

Sparck Jones, Karen and Peter Willett.  Readings in Information Retrieval  Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. copyright 1997
Additional readings from the ACM digital library

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Grading
Your performance will be assessed based on regular, active participation in and contribution to the class discussions; some homework assignments such as the Web page creation, a project that you will design and implement; several class presentations of varying length. I prefer not to have examinations unless it seems necessary for the integrity of the course.

Here is a starting point for a grading plan:
Grades available are A, B, C, D and F, with + / - options on the A, B, C, D grades.  (No D grades are available for graduate students.

1.  Do everything that is required for the course (submit every assignment on time, complete and correct), attend every class and participate actively.
        ===> B (if at the graduate level, regardless of whether the student is a graduate or undergraduate student) or C (if undergraduate expectations are met but not exceeded.)
2.  Do less than what is required, grade goes down.  The amount depends on how much is neglected.
3.  Do more than what is required, the grade goes up.  Again, the amount of increase depends on the degree of excellence of the work.

        Extras will come from the level of participation, the quality of assignments, the difficulty and quality of work on the project.

Some projects: (descriptions and other projects to come shortly)
Explore Genetic algorithms as a way to determine an appropriate ranking function for web search results
Build a current events server
Create forum for open discussion with hooks for effective searching
Design and implement an information portal for a specific education group (Young children, teens, undergrads, grads, life long learning)

Class Projects

Class Projects links: