Announcements from the Instructor

Csci 8701, Overview of Database Research, Fall 2000.

• Dec. 12, 2000: Final examination (take-home) is available from this site.
• Nov. 30th, 2000:
  1. Last day of classes is 12/13/00 which eliminates Dec. 14th time slot for project presentations. Revised schedule for project presentation:
     • 12/5 Tuesday: G1, G2, G7
     • 12/7 Thursday: G3, G4, G8
     • 12/12 Tuesday: G5, G6
  2. Each project presentation should be limited to 20 minutes to allow completion of 3 presentations in a 75 minute meeting. Limit each presentation to 10 slides since an average presenter takes about 2 minutes to explain each slide. Know which slide you should be on at the end of 10 minutes and 15 minutes to ensure proper pace. A partner within each group should watch time and let the speaker know when 10 minutes are left or 5 minutes are left.
  3. Presentations on survey papers should include motivation, major problems in the area, key results, open problems, and key sources. Focus on major problems and key results. Use summary figures (e.g. classification diagram for all approached to recovery in the Computing Survey paper in our readings) or tables to highlight key messages.
  4. Presentations on projects should follow the format of paper analysis. Candidate sections include motivation, problem definition, key issues and alternative ways of resolving those, related work and their limitations, your approach, validation, conclusions (key contributions), and future work (assumptions and potential extensions).
• Nov. 28th, 2000:
  1. Notes on data warehouses from 5708 textbook are at this site. Last entry relates to the topic.
  2. Schedule for project presentation:
     • 12/5 Tuesday: G1, G2, G7
     • 12/7 Thursday: G3, G4, G8
     • 12/12 Tuesday: G5, G6
  3. Groups presenting in the week of 12/5-7 can submit their revised project report in the following week.
  4. One member of each group had an opportunity to present the paper analysis. Other member is expected to present the project report.
• Nov. 21st, 2000:
  1. Dr. Gaefe posed a couple of very interesting questions on choice of access methods (B+tree with Z-order vs. R*tree). These questions are available from this link . Your responses are welcome.
  2. One of our alumni is looking for people with strong database background to build a core database group at Siebel, a leader in CRM software. Please contact me if you are interested.
• Nov. 16th, 2000:
  1. Feedback . on project draft (HW4) is online. Groups G1 and G5 should send me email by Friday lunch-time describing how they plan to address the comments.
  2. Thursday lecture will include two presentations. Fist presentation is by group G6 on parallel databases. Second presentation will be made by Ms. Wei-Li WU, a senior Ph.D. student in my group, on data mining in context of spatial datasets. Thursday officehours are postponed to next week.
• Nov. 8th, 2000:
  1. G. Graefe, Architect of Microsoft SQL Server will be on campus November 13th and 14th. He will present a talk Monday evening. Click here for details. We are working with the hosts to invite him to the Tuesday meeting of Csci 8701.
  2. Thank you for attending the Cray Colloquium on topic of database management issues in Mobile and wireless environment. It was given by Prof. Sham Navathe.
• Oct. 18th, 2000:
  1. Reviewing the fundamental papers in Database literature is giving me an opportunity to look back at the accomplishments of spatial database research and find new research opportunities. Many of the reearch opportunities are worthy of MS projects and/or PhD theses. You are welcome to contact me to explore these or your course projects for MS/PhD work.
  2. Mid semester examination will be held on coming Tuesday (10/24). Review sample questions to prepare for the examination. Students with no background in Csci 5708 will have adequate options.
• Sept. 20th, 2000:
  Feedback . on paper critique (HW1) is online. Groups G2, G6 and G7 should talk to me today for timely feedback.
• Sept. 20th, 2000:
  1. URLs: The urls listed in HW0 will be used for peer reviewers. Please unpdate the relevant html files to add entries for your homework 1 material (i.e. critique, presentation) before Thursday lecture. Please continue to update these web pages as you prepare material for other homworks. Peer reviewers should test these links to ensure that ehty can read the web pages.
  2. For the peer review, BOTH members on a team should provide input to both of the other papers critiques. Do not split the work of reviewing as it reduces feedback to the authors.
  3. For the benefit of UNITE students, Students in classroom should use microphone when asking questions to ensure that distant students can listen to the questions.
• Sept. 14th, 2000:
  1. Information about groups, paper analysis and peer review assignments is at http://www.cs.umn.edu/~shekhar/8701/group.html . Please verify that the paper assignments are consistent with the choices made in Homework 0.
  2. Peer review group for paper T6.1 absolutely need to turn in the reviews on time due the schedule of presentations. If you are assigned to peer-review this paper and you can not meet the deadline, please contact the instructor immediately.
  3. The url (web address to share paper analysis, peer reviews) turned in my most groups are not specific enough. Each group is encourages to create a link (say cs8701) in their home page to point to files and sub-directories relevant to this course.
• Sept. 6th, 2000:
  1. Due dates for homeworks are the first lectures in the designated weeks. For example, HW0 is due on Tuesday 9/12/2000 in the lecture.
  2. Project ideas: A list of ideas for class project is available from project-list .
  3. Team formation: Students stills looking for a partner to form a team are encouraged to put up their contact information on the white board in the lecture. This will facilitate interaction via email outside lecture hours towards forming teams. In particular two UNITE students are looking for partners. Their email addresses are asun2@mmm.com and emilyb@us.ibm.com.
  4. Overrides: Computer Science office has a list of all students who signed on the class roster on TUesday 9/5/2000 and will give out magic numbers for registering in the course.
• Sept. 5th, 2000:
  1. Overrides: Overrides will be available for motivated students with significant research interest in Databases.
  2. TA support: This course may have TA-support if the enrollment exceeds 30 students. TA-support will be extremely valuable in grading homeworks and examination. In absence of TA-support the course may use peer review system to provide timely feedback on projects and presentations.
  3. Final draft of syllabus and schedule is available now. Note that the homework descriptions have evolved significantly.
• June-Aug. 2000:
  1. A preliminary draft of syllabus and schedule is available. It lists a subset of the papers from the textbook to be discussed.
  2. Schedule: The texbook focussed on the "history" and chapters are ordered in chronological order. It is clear that history is becoming less interesting in face of the mergence of data mining, semi-structured data on web etc. It may make sense to cover the topics in reverse chronological order, i.e. chapter 9, 8, 7, ... Schedule may be reorganized to reflect this.
  3. Examinations, Projects, Homeworks: Various acivities in a research seminar courses should be 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 exams. similar to those for their thesis requirements. A project broken down in several steps will be relevant here.