LBSC 796/INFM 718R
Information Retrieval Systems
Spring 2011
Project Plan Assignment

Students may elect to join a project team formed by the instructor, or they may elect to complete a project that they design either individually or with one or more other students from the same course.

Student-designed projects can be either research-oriented (leading to an academic paper) or operationally oriented (leading to a complete working system). Students who elect to design their own project should meet with the instructor no later than February 16 (and preferably much earlier) to discuss their ideas. They will then be required to prepare a complete project plan with milestones comparable to those specified for team projects and to submit it by the due date for this assignment.

Instructor-designed project are operationally oriented. Students who elect to be assigned by the instructor to a project team will need to turn in answers to the questionnaire below by the due date of this assignment. Project team assignments will be announced at the start of the next class session.

Project teams formed by the instructor will typically include 4-6 students with the following principal roles:

  1. Search system design and implementation
  2. User experience design and implementation
  3. Batch evaluation design and batch evaluation
  4. Interactive evaluation design and interactive evaluation
The available instructor-designed projects are:
  1. Build a system to help Web users find other users that they may want to follow on Twitter by searching for previous posts from those users on some some topic.
  2. Build a system to help high school students make sense of the transcripts from the Apollo moon landing missions by finding oral history interviews and/or secndary sources (e.g., books) that are that are freely available online that could help to explain events and technical terms in the transcript that they want to learn more about.
  3. Build a system to help researchers find and use the half-million email messages released by the tobacco companies as part of the Master Settlement Agreement based on the metadata and the text (from OCR) that is provided with that collection.
If you choose to participate in an instructor-designed project, please send answers to the following questions by email to oard@umd.edu:
  1. What would be your first and second choices for a project (selected from the three listed above)?
  2. What would be your first, second, and third choices for your principal role on your project team (selected from the four listed above)?
  3. Briefly describe your computer programming background, including and programming languages that you know. This need not be extensive -- even a course in high school is worth mentioning.
  4. For MLS students, have you completed LBSC 650? LBSC 750?
  5. Any other comments that you wish to have considered.
Doug Oard
Last modified: Feb 1 2011