Announcements:

• Project presentation has now been scheduled on Dec. 13, Tuesday, 11am-1:30pm, in 3405SC. Please find more detail here. Also, check out the guidelines for this poster presentation and project report.
• The office hour on Tuesday, Dec. 6 has been moved to Monday, Dec. 5, 9-11am.
• Grading of assignment 3 is now completed; please check out the grading comments and solutions in the wiki.
• An extra office hour will be held on Monday, Nov. 14, at 4-5pm.
• A list of topics to be covered in the midterm is available here, which is also linked to the reading for the midterm review class.
• Assignment #3 is now available. Please check the schedule page and the assigment page. It's also available here.
• Assignment #2 is now available. Please check the schedule page and the assigment page. It's also available here.
• The office hours for the week of Sept 19 have been changed due to schedule conflict: (1) Office hour on Tuesday, Sept 20 will be 1pm-2pm (instead of the normal 10am-11am); (2) Office hour on Thursday, Sept 22 will be 3:15pm-4:00pm (instead of 3:30-4:30pm).
• Assignment one is now available. Please check the schedule page and the assigment page. It's also available here.
• The class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2-3:15pm in Siebel Center, room 1131. The first class will be on Aug. 23, 2011, Tuesday.

This is a graduate-level course covering the major research topics in the growing field Information Retrieval (IR). Briefly speaking, IR is the underlying science of search engines. Although the impact of IR research is most visible from the recent dramatic growth of the Web search engine industry, the history of IR research actually dates back to several decades ago, and a large number of research papers have been published in this interdisciplinary field of computer science, library, and information science.

The goal of this course is: 1) to provide an overview of IR research in the past several decades, 2) to systematically review the core research topics in IR, 3) to discuss the most recent research progress, and 4) to give students enough training for doing research in IR and an opportunity to work on a research project.

The course will involve lectures by instructor, student presentations, and research projects on major research topics in information retrieval. Students are expected to read quite a few research papers, discuss them using a wiki space, and present some of them at the class. There will be a late midterm and a few assignments. Students are also required to finish an individual research project that can potentially lead to a publication.

Prerequisite: Students are expected to have a good knowledge of basic probability and statisticcs. Some background in one or more of the following areas: information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, data mining, or databases would be a plus, but not required.