Syllabus for CSci 8701, Overview of Database Research, Fall 2000

Time, Location, Call #: TuTh 1115-1230, MechE 102, 29610, 3 cr.
Instructor and TAs
Role: Name Office & Hours Phone Email
Instructor: Prof. S. Shekhar EE/CS 5-203, Tu, Th. 1230-130pm 624-8307 shekhar@cs.umn.edu
TA: tbd tbd tbd tbd
Schedule: lecture, homework and examination schedule
Web Pages:
Non-local: DBLP , ACM SIGMOD , VLDB Foundation , IEEE DE Bulletin , Asilomar report ,
Local: FINAL EXAM, MQ EXAM, Class Notes, Review questions ,
Instructor Announcements, TA Announcements, project-list, reearch opportunities , Group info.,
Text Book: Readings in Database Systems, M. Stonebraker et al. Morgan Kauffman (3rd Ed.) ISBN 1-55860-523-1 (Note: it has a web page).
Supplementary Material: A Tour of Spatial Databases, S. Shekhar et al. Prentice Hall, ISBN 013-017480-7
Copy Shop: tbd
Topics: Past, present and future of database research; relational implementation techniques; transaction management; distributed, parallel and internet database systems; objects in databases; data mining and decision support; benchmarking database systems, current trends.

Examinations and Assignments: The main objective of this class is to study research methods and literature in database systems. Various acivities in a research seminar courses are linked to the goals of the audience. Most students may like to get a broad overview of the research topics, methodologies, major results, open problems and potential future directions. In-class written examinations on survey papers from the reading list will be useful towards this purpose.

Ph.D. students in this course may benefit from an examination similar to the take-home examination in the Written Preliminary Examination. A take-home examination analyzing a research paper (potentialy from outside the reading list) will help here. Potential sources for the paper would be conference proceedings for SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, CIKM, SIGKDD journals such as ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, VLDB Journal, Information Systems, KDD journal etc.

Honors undergradaute students as well as M.S. students in the course may benefit from projects and term papers similar to those for their thesis requirements. A project broken down in several steps will be relevant here.

Cheating/ Collaboration: Getting help from services like general debugging service (GDS), buying erm papers from web-sites (e.g. cheaters.com), copying someone else's assignment, or the common solution of written or programming assignments will be considered cheating. The purpose of assignments is to provide individual feedback as well to get you thinking. Interaction for the purpose of understanding a problem is not considered cheating and will be encouraged. However, the actual solution to problems must be one's own.

Helpful Comments: This class is Very Interesting and Useful for audience interested in database systems research as well as in honors/Master/Doctoral projects. We will explore a number of current research areas which are very important yet fairly open for research. Databases continue to be the heart of information management in areas ranging from business to scientific domains (e.g. earth observation systems, genomics). Current interest in e-commerce and data mining has renewed the central importance of the topic within internet, information management and computer science.

To get full benefit out of the class you have to work independently and regularly. Read the papers before the meeting and bring comments for discussion. Plan to spend at least 6 hrs a week (a little more during first few weeks till you feel comfortable with geographic information and queries) on this class doing projects or reading.