CS 4803 - WWW: Science, Technology and Applications
Fall 2008
Description
In the last ten years, the WWW has changed
people's everyday experience, the access and generation of information,
the way we organize our society, several fundamental business models,
as well as several fundamental computational models.
This course is intended to give a wide
computer science perspective of fundamental science principles,
technologies and applications involved in the WWW.
It is our hope to make very current technical content
accessible to our undergraduate students.
It is particularly aimed to give students pursuing related careers
a broad overview of the technological aspects of the WWW.
This course will:
(a) Review the history of the evolution of the WWW
from a technological and application perspective.
(b) Review technologies that have supported
information retrieval such as searching and ranking,
reputation and recommendation systems,
management of
very large datasets,
and issues of security and spamming.
Review fundamental scientific questions
arising from the WWW "phenomenon".
(c) Review "killer" applications,
such as peer-to-peer networks, e-commerce,
online communities, content distribution systems
and othr social networks.
(d) Review societal and business impact and opportunities.
Prerequisites
The course has no official prerequisites,
other than junior status or permission of the instructor.
However, some familiarity/interest in the WWW will be assumed.
Beyond the College of Computing, we particularly welcome
students across all Colleges of Georgia Tech.
Format and Evaluation
We shall have lectures and/or discussions every Tue and Thu.
Topics, reading materials and assignments are found in the
Lectures web page.
(1)You should come to the lectures (unless you have a reasonable excuse
and inform the instructor) and you should participate in the discussions.
(2)You will be asked to write critiques on topics that will be covered.
Critiques will be shared with the entire class.
You are also expected to participate in a class online discussion forum.
(3)As an individuals or in a small group, you will be posponsible for leading
a topic presentation and/or discussion.
(4)Optional: You may do a project, involving novel research or technology development.
Your instructor encourages such projects, and will fully support them
(perhaps in collaboration with additional faculty members,
if that is appropriate), provided that the project has clear potential
to lead to a scientific publication or software deployment.
Lectures
Tu-Thu 4:30-6:00, CCB 17.
Instructor
Milena Mihail,
Associate Professor
Office phone: 404-385-0617
Cell Phone: 404 379-1460
Office hours: By appointment, Klaus 2138.
mihail@cc.gatech.edu
All email concerning this course should have a subject entitled CS4803.
Sample Resources
Books:
"Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age", by Duncan J. Watts.
"The Tipping Point", by Malcolm Gladwell.
"The Wisdom of Crowds", by James Surowieski.
"Micromotives and Macrobehavior", by Thomas C. Schelling.
"The Long Tail", by Chris Anderson
http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html (see also book).
"Social Consequences of Internet Use", by J.E. Katz and R.E. Rice.
"Web Server Technology", N. Yeager and R.E. McGrath.
"Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies", by A. Oram.
Introduction to Information Retrieval
by C.D. Manning, P. Raghavan and H. Schutze.
Articles:
As We May Think,
by V. Bush.
A Little History of the WWW,
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment,
by Jon Kleinberg.
The Anatomy of a Large Scale Search Engine, by S. Brin and L. Page.
Searching the Web,
by Arasu et al.
Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis,
Deerwester et al.
Information Dynamics in a Networked World, by Adamic and Adar,
The Largest Social Network Ever Analyzed,
by Leskovec and Horvitz.
Algorithms, Games and the Internet, by Christos Papadimitriou.
"Cascading Behavior in Networks: Algorithmic and Economic Issues."
by Jon Kleinberg, In Algorithmic Game Theory,
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Courses/Web Sites:
Networks, by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg.
Networked Life, by Mike Kearns.
Internet Applications and Services (click Teaching),
by Constantine Dovrolis.
Complex Human Networks Reading Group.
Class Web-site
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mihail/index4803.html.
This site is maintained by Milena Mihail,
please report problems to
mihail@cc.gatech.edu.