Home | Administrative Policies | Course Structure | Materials | Assignment Schedule

This is a hard course with significant programming requirements. If programming/hacking/web work is not something you are interested in doing, then don't take this course. This course is not hard because of the programming per se. It is hard because of the scale of the data that you will be working with.

During lecture I will periodically (every 15 minutes or so) stop and ask the class to comment or ask questions. This may result in an uncomfortable silence, but has been scientifically shown to make the class more effective.

 

Each class I will distribute a card on which you will put your name for attendance purposes. I also encourage you to write a comment or question about lecture so that I can keep tabs on how the class is learning. If you wish to submit an anonymous question, take an extra card and don't put your name on it.

 

Components of this course:

• Reading/Quizzes (about 20%):
  • Each week will have a reading assignment
  • Readings and lectures will be quizzed online (open book/closed friend)
• Programming (about 60%):
  • Crawling the web
  • Indexing Wikipedia with Hadoop
  • Building a query interface
  • Building a image search engine (like TinEye)
  • Building an audio search engine (like Shazam!)
• Class Participation (about 20%)
  • Mostly attendance

Grade Calibration:

My expectation is that someone who does the work assigned well would receive a B / B+ . I occasionally give an A+ and I often find myself giving students C's, D's and F's. Please consider this now if you have particular requirements regarding grade point averages.