Objectives: In this course we shall present advanced technologies for accessing large repositories of data typically generated in the web as a platform. The goal is to illustrate some of the most innovative techniques used nowadays to fully exploit various kinds of web data, such as links, multimedia objects, consumer generated content. The course is organized as a set of seminars, i.e., scientific paper presentation and discussion. Seminars will be assigned to the students at the beginning of the course.

Please refer to the first lexture slides for more information on the course structure and content.

Syllabus:

• Information retrieval and page ranking methods
• Structure of the web, hub and authorities
• Identification of Web communities
• Web search and geographical datal
• To-k selection queries in relational databases
• Similarity based retrieval in metric spaces
• Database and k-means clustering
• Graph theory and recommender Systems
• Context-based personalization and data warehouse
• Personalization and query processing

Exam

• The winter session is scheduled on Tue. February 13, 2007, at 9.00 in room E531.
• The exam consists in two parts: the presentations made during the course and a final oral exam. Both of them will be graded: P, O.
• The final grade is obtained as: F = 0.7*P + 0.3*O
• In the oral exam the student must prove to have read and understood the papers that he has not presented. Hence I want to check that you have understood:
• The main problems that the authors addressed in the paper
• The approach and the technology used
• The results obtained
• The main limitations of the proposed solution
• During the oral exam, for each student, I will select a paper (among those that he did not present) and I will ask to the student to discuss the above mentioned issues, using the slides (those used during the seminars).

Seminars

• Lecture 1 - October 4th: Introduction to the course and the seminars slides
• Lecture 2 - October 11th Prerequisites on: linear algebra, eigenvectors and eigenvalues, graphs, maximum flow problem, markov chain slides
• Lecture 3 - October 16th Prerequisites on Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems slides

• Seminar 1 - October 23rd Jon M. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. J. ACM, 46(5):604-632, 1999. paper (short - exclude sections 6 and 7 ) slides
  Speakers: Martin Cetkovsky

• Seminar 2 - October 30th Agichtein, E., Brill, E., Dumais, S., and Ragno, R. (2006). Learning user interaction models for predicting web search result preferences. In SIGIR '06: Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, pages 3-10, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press. paper slides
  Speakers: Kazimianec Michail

• Seminar 3 November 6th Gary William Flake, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, and Leonid Zhukov. Methods for mining web communities: Bibliometric, spectral, and flow. In Web Dynamics, pages 45-68. 2004. paper (short) slides
  Speakers: Martin Cetkovsky and Gordevicius Juozas

• Seminar 4 - November 13th Taro Tezuka, Takeshi Kurashima, and Katsumi Tanaka. Toward tighter integration of web search with a geographic information system. In 15th International World Wide Web Conference WWW06. 2006. paper (short) slides
  Speakers: Choesang Tenzin and Kazimianec Michail

• Seminar 5 - November 24th Bruno, N., Chaudhuri, S., and Gravano, L. (2002). Top-k selection queries over relational databases: Mapping strategies and performance evaluation. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 27(2):153-187. paper (long) slides
  Speakers: Ivan Zorzi and Romans Kasperovics

• Seminar 6 - December 1st (Room 411) Gediminas Adomavicius, Ramesh Sankaranarayanan, Shahana Sen, and Alexander Tuzhilin. Incorporating contextual information in recommender systems using a multidimensional approach. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 23(1):103-145, 2005. paper (long) slides1 - slides2
  Speakers: Eugeny Kharlamov and Gordevicius Juozas

• Seminar 7 - December 4th (Room 412) (14.00-16.00) Gediminas Adomavicius, Alexander Tuzhilin, and Rhong Zheng. Rql: A query language for recommender systems. New York University, CeDER-05-15 2005. paper (short) slides1 - slides2
  Speakers: Eugeny Kharlamov and Romans Kasperovics

• Seminar 8 - December 11th (Room 412) (14.00-16.00) Koutrika, G. and Ioannidis, Y. E. (2004). Personalization of queries in database systems. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2004, 30 March - 2 April 2004, Boston, MA, USA, pages 597-608.paper (short) - slides
  Speakers: Linas Baltrunas and Choesang Tenzin

• Seminar 9 - December 15th (Room 411) Andreas Thor and Erhard Rahm. AWESOME - A data warehouse-based system for adaptive website recommendations. Proceedings of the 30th VLDB Conference, pages 384-395, Toronto, Canada, 2004.paper (short) - slides
  Speakers: Linas Baltrunas and Ivan Zorzi

• Charu C. Aggarwal, Joel L. Wolf, Kun-Lung Wu, and Philip S. Yu. Horting hatches an egg: a new graph-theoretic approach to collaborative filtering. In KDD '99: Proceedings of the fifth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, pages 201-212, New York, NY, USA, 1999. ACM Press. paper (short)
• Carlos Ordonez. Programming the k-means clustering algorithm in sql. In KDD '04: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, pages 823-828, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press.paper (short)