CSci 8701, Overview of Database Research, Fall 2006

Tuesday 6:30 P.M. - 9:00 P.M., EE/CS 3-125
Instructor and TA
Role: Name Office & Hours Phone Email
Instructor: Prof. S. Shekhar EE/CS 5-203,
Tue. 5:30-6:30PM		 624-8307 shekhar@cs.umn.edu
TA: Sangho Kim EE/CS 5-202,
Thu. 1:00-2:00PM		 626-7703 sangho@cs.umn.edu
Schedule: lecture, homework and examination schedule
Web Pages:
NON-LOCAL
  • Search: Books (amazon.com), Papers (DBLP), CiteSeer, Google Scholar, Wikipedia
  • Browse or download papers from Journals: IEEE TKDE, ACM TODS, VLDB Journal , Information Systems , Computing Surveys ,
    Applied Computing Review , Journal of Data and Knowledge Eng. , Information Processing Letters , GeoInformatica Journal, IEEE TGRS
  • Conference Proceedings: SIGKDD, SSD, VLDB, SIGMOD, CIKM/ACMGIS
  • Bulletins: IEEE DE Bulletin, ACM SIGMOD Bulletin, ACM SIGKDD Explorations
    LOCAL
  • Class notes, Announcements (updated: 11/22), Paper Discussion Forum, HW Feedbacks, Group info., (Group info. Archived)
  • Sample Final, Sample Midterm
    Pre-requisite: Familiarity with Relational Databases or Geographic Information Systems.
    Text Book: Readings in Database Systems, J.M. Hellerstein and M. Stonebraker, MIT Press(4th Ed), 2005, ISBN 0-262-69314-3 (Text Book Website).
    Supplementary Material: A collection of papers.
    Topics: Past, present and future of Database research; Data models, DBMS architecture, Query processing, Data storage and access methods, Transaction management, Database Evolution, Data warehousing and mining, Web services and databases, Stream-based data management.

    Examinations and Assignments: The main objective of this class is to study research methods and literature in database systems. Core research skills of literature analysis, innovation, evaluation of new ideas, and communication are emphasized via homeworks and projects.

    Various acivities in a research seminar courses are linked to the goals of the audience. Many 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 analyzing research papers towards the Written Preliminary Examination. Potential sources for the paper would be conference proceedings or journals such as those listed above.

    Honors undergraduate students as well as graduate students in the course may benefit from innovative projects similar to those for their thesis requirements. A innovative project broken down in several steps will be relevant here. The course project would entail 50+ hours of work towards meeting the Plan C requirement for M.S. students.

    Cheating/ Collaboration: Getting help from services like general debugging service (GDS), buying term 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. "Science in an Exponential World", The Center of the Universe,