Dragomir Radev (who’s visiting Columbia this year from the University of Michigan) is teaching this interesting-looking course this spring on search engine technology. He said that one of the assignments will be to build your own search engine, and another might be to build that machine that can figure out what you’re typing just by listening to the sound of your keystrokes. It looks pretty cool–it’s too bad it’s offered at 6pm so I can’t make it.

On a barely related note: the class meets once per week for two hours. I know that people often find this sort of once-a-week schedule convenient, but it’s been my impression that research shows that people learn better from more frequently-scheduled classes. I usually do twice a week. I’d prefer meeting three times per week, but Columbia doesn’t seem to do much of that anymore. According to Dave Krantz, when he was a student at Yale way back when, some of the courses would be Mon Wed Fri, and others would be Tues Thurs Sat. That’s a bit too rigorous for my taste, but I wouldn’t mind teaching some Mon Wed Fri courses.

P.S. Drago clarifies:

I [Drago] didn’t say that I would give an assignment about recognizing what is typed. I said that this could be a nice course project.

The actual assignments that I am planning to give will be chosen from this list.

– build a search engine
– build a spam recognition system
– perform a text mining analysis of a large data set such as the Enron mail corpus or the Netflix movie recommendation data set
– perform an analysis of a large networked data set such as a snapshot of the web graph (e.g., write code to compute pagerank).

I would imagine that each student can only do 2 or 3 of them.

Then each student will also have to propose an independent course project where the sky is the limit. Some ideas include cross-lingual information retrieval, text summarization, question answering, identifying online communities, information propagation in blogs, etc.