Villanova Department of Computing Sciences

Announcement

Fall 2008 Special Topics Course : CSC 9010-001 & CSC 5930-101
Search Technologies and Personal Information Management

Posted: 2008/5/2

This is a somewhat split topic, but not an unreasonable combination.  We do a lot of searching.  An immense amount of information is available to us.  We find it and then we have to do something with it.  This special topic course will address both sides of the information challenge.

A 2005 Workshop on Personal Information Management summarized the topic thus:
“Personal information management or PIM is attracting increasing attention as an area of study. In the ideal world, we have the right information at the right time, in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to perform the current activity. Tools and technologies help so that we spend less time with burdensome and error prone actions of information management (such as filing). We then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done.”

We will look at a variety of topics including search engine performance, information retrieval, database management, artificial intelligence and user-interface issues.  Certainly, we will talk about digital libraries. We will explore a variety of tools and get to understand the issues involved.  Our goal will be an understanding of what the deluge of available information means to us and how we can harness it for our purposes and how we can advance the state of the art in the control of information for our personal use.

The class is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in computing related disciplines.  Students from other disciplines should talk to the instructor before enrolling.

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