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COMS E6125 : Web-enHanced Information Management (WHIM)

COURSE BENEFITS
- Study and develop emerging technologies that can potentially aid information consumers and knowledge workers to efficiently cull out Web materials most relevant to the project or task at hand, and use it productively.
- Study and develop new information management and Internet-scale data and computation representation, fusion, analysis, organization and exchange capabilities that can better enable information producers and e-commerce participants to economically and efficiently achieve their goals.

APPLICABLE DEGREE PROGRAMS
- Although this is a graduate-level Computer Science course, advanced undergraduates and non-majors are very welcome.
- One of the electives for the MS Software Systems track. Also an acceptable elective for the BS and BA Systems tracks with advisor's permission.
- Non-CS majors may optionally take the "non-technical" option. See the brief blurb here and then contact the instructor by email for further information. (All CS and most CE, EE, IEOR or DBMI students should enroll in the regular technical version.)

Lecturer: Professor Gail Kaiser
Office: 607 CEPSR
Office hours: Tuesdays right after class, or by appointment
Phone: Please do not call, except for pre-arranged teleconferences - instead send email
Email: kaiser+6125@cs.columbia.edu (make sure to include the '+6125')

TA: Mr. Swapneel Sheth
Office: 608 CEPSR
Office hours: Tuesdays 3-5
Phone: 212-939-7184
Email: swapneel@cs.columbia.edu

TA: Mr. Suman Srinivasan
Office: 725 CEPSR
Office hours: Wednesdays 11-1
Phone: 212-939-7192
Email: sumans@cs.columbia.edu

Class Homepage: http://bank.cs.columbia.edu/classes/cs6125

Credits for Course: 3.0
Class Type: Seminar

Prerequisites: Any one or more of COMS W4111, COMS W4112, COMS W4156, COMS W4180, COMS W4187, COMS W4444. This course is primarily intended for Computer Science graduate students, but undergraduates and non-majors are very welcome.

Bulletin Description: History of hypertext, markup languages, groupware and the Web. Evolving Web protocols, formats and computation paradigms such as HTTP, XML and Web Services. Novel application domains enabled by the Web and societal issues. Term paper and programming project. Seminar focus changes frequently to remain timely.

Required Text(s): None.

Reference Text(s): Various Web materials.

Exam(s): None.

Grading: Paper 45%, project 45%, presentation 10%.

Paper: Individually authored research paper. Most papers involve an in-depth survey and analysis of a technical topic or comparison of multiple technical approaches. All reference materials must be fully and accurately cited! Potential paper topics are suggested and students are encouraged to invent their own.

Project: Individual or self-organized team programming project. Most projects involve developing a new system or technical evaluation of some existing system(s). Demos and documentation are required. Potential project topics are suggested and students are encouraged to invent their own. It is acceptable to do the project in the same general area as the paper topic, if desired, but not required.

Presentation: Individual 10-minute presentation in class. The topic can be the same as either the paper or the project, or something entirely different. If based on a team project, each presentation must be developed separately by the individual student; however, please coordinate to avoid redundancy (discuss this issue with the instructor in advance if this applies to you).

Hardware Requirements: Any computational device with sufficient Internet access that can run the software below.

Software Requirements: Email, Web browser, either Acrobat Reader or Powerpoint Viewer to access lecture slides, appropriate word processing for the paper and presentation, all software development and execution facilities needed for the project.

Assignment Submission: The paper, project source code and documentation, and presentation slides must be uploaded to CourseWorks.

Critical note: All documents and code must be submitted in Adobe pdf, MS word, MS powerpoint, HTML, XML, or plain ascii text format; figures must be viewable embedded in the document or via a conventional Web browser without any special downloads or plugins. It is your responsibility to ensure all submissions are "safe" prior to submission; any submissions that make the instructor's or a TA's malware checker unhappy will not be read or graded.

Academic Honesty Policy

See the department's academic honesty policy.

For the purposes of this course, students are permitted, indeed encouraged, to "reuse" existing open source or public domain code as well as any publicly available APIs, utilities, tools, frameworks, etc., but all such "reuse" must be clearly documented in the submitted assignments (e.g., by providing the download url). Students are not permitted to "reuse" any code or systems that are not available to the general public (e.g., proprietary to the student's employer) other than code they wrote by themselves personally.

Documentation (other than in-code comments accompanying the above), i.e., the various written prose assignments, may not be "reused" under any circumstances. All reference materials, whether electronic or physical, must be listed in the submission. Students must write in their own words, without any copying or paraphrasing from reference materials, with the sole exception of very short quotations (e.g., one or two sentences, a definition, a table or an image) that are clearly indicated as quotations (e.g., placed in quote marks) and explicitly cited (e.g., [David Pogue, Behind the Scenes of “iPhone: The Musical”, Pogue's Posts: The Latest in Technology From David Pogue, The New York Times, online edition, July 12, 2007, <http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/>.]).

Original sources are required, e.g., do not cite Wikipedia.