Announcements from the Instructor

Csci 8705, Overview of Database Research, Fall 2001.

• Dec. 13th, 2001 :
  1. Sample questions for the final examination are available from sampleQstn.html . Additional questions are available from the supplementary book.
• Nov. 29th, 2001 :
  1. Instructor's feedback on Homework 4 is available from feedback.html .
• Oct. 23rd, 2001 :
  1. A good overview of the GIS reclassify operation at given at feedback.html .
• Sept. 18th, 2001 :
  1. Wei-Li is putting up the list of papers selected by groups for class presentation. I had a conversation with Wei-Li a few minutes after the lecture. She got most of the homework 1 submission on Friday and is in final stages of making the list available on the TA-announcements.
  2. Class notes page is now open. It has notes from last two weeks.
• Sept. 14th, 2001 :
  1. List of open problems has been update to include several new items. Please review the list again in case you are looking for project ideas.
• Sept. 11th, 2001 :
  Overrides are available for following students. Please contact computer science reception for magic numbers.
  • Lipee Gami
  • Changxing Jin
  • Ming Yu
  • Zhihong Yao
  • Mohammad Hasan
  • Ward Ortmann
  • Chang Qing Zhou
  • Zhaoxiu Ding
  • Manjula S Nandiraju
• Sept. 6th, 2001 (after lecture):
  1. An interesting example to motivate spatial extension of SQL is available from this link.
  2. Following students are looking for a partner to form a group:
     • Mohammad Hasan ?? hasa0015@umn.edu or hasan007@umn.edu ??
     • Ward Ortmann ortma001@umn.edu
     • Chang Qing Zhou czhou@cs
     • ZhaoXin Ding zding@cs
     • Manjula S Nandiraju nand0011@tc
• Sept. 6th, 2001 (before lecture):
  1. Wei-Li dropped the original copy to copy center in east bank and they'll do best to send the binded copies to bookstore at this Friday.
  2. Wei-Li will hold TA office hours at EE/CS 5-202 instead of the 2nd floor TA office.
  3. IEEE Computer Society recently sent faculty members an email to encourage student memberships. I became a member of IEEE Computer Society in first year of graduate studies and have enjoyed it greatly. It is highly recommeded. Student membership details are available at http://computer.org/students and relevant forms are available at http://computer.org/join .
• Sept. 4th, 2001:
  1. Final draft of syllabus and schedule is available.
• April 2001:
  1. A preliminary draft of syllabus and schedule is available.
  2. 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.