In the last ten years Search Systems have become one of the most important components of computing. The evolution and success of WWW is closely tied to the developments in search technology. The Web continues to evolve. Early Web was a web of text documents only. Images, Audio, video, and sensor networks are rapidly becoming part of the Web. Rise of social networks with so-called user generated content, has offered its own challenges. And finally, the real time search for content coming from micro-blogs as well as micro-events is changing the way people communicate, create and utilize collective knowledge, and the nature of News. All this is transforming not only the nature and applications of the Web, but the modern society itself. Original search techniques developed to deal with primarily textual data are evolving rapidly to cope with this transformation of the information on the Web.

In this course we will study concepts and techniques related to all aspects of Search Systems. First, we will consider basic search technology and the state of art systems. Then we will explore rapidly developing techniques for multimedia search, local search, event-search, real time search and social search. This course will explore the underlying principles and techniques required to develop Search Systems for this ever-evolving and transforming nature of the Web. Functionality required for the next generation search approaches will be identified and principles and techniques to implement systems for the next generation search will be explored.

In this course you will study, research, and implement some of these techniques.

Junior or higher level student in Computer Science or related area.

Students are encouraged to work in a group for their project assignment. The homework assignments on the other hand should be individually done. Students can, however, feel free to discuss the assignment with their peers.