Jacob Danovitch

Jacob Danovitch

Applied science @ Microsoft

CSI4107: Information Retrieval and the Internet

Description

Basic principles of Information Retrieval. Indexing methods. Query processing. Linguistic aspects of Information Retrieval. Agents and artificial intelligence approaches to Information Retrieval. Relation of Information Retrieval to the World Wide Web. Search engines. Servers and clients. Browser and server side programming for Information Retrieval. Source

Content

Professor: Caroline Barrière

Grade: A

Projects

The focus of the course was to learn in a hands-on way by using the lecture content to build our own search engine. This included using vector space and boolean models of information retrieval, implmenting user-facing features such as spelling correction, and more. My continued work on this project lives here.

Tests

There were four quizzes throughout the course, covering:

  1. Boolean and Vector Space retrieval models
  2. Language models, Probabilistic models, Query Completion, Model evaluation
  3. Machine learning (supervised and unsupervised), Query completion
  4. PageRank, Web crawling

Research Project

The final component of the course was an independent research project, within which we presented a 6 minute talk and authored a written report. The page for my talk is here (though most of the slide content is visual).