Information Systems for non-CS-majors

Course Description:

This course covers various topics in information systems, at a conceptual level. Database, search engine, data warehousing and data mining technologies are introduced. Students will get an opportunity to learn and practice some of the technologies in these areas. They create a small database, insert, manipulate and query the data; they perform analysis tasks using some data mining techniques. Finally, they use some existing search engines to evaluate the quality of the results. Course grading is based on both tests and assignments.

Prerequisite:

Textbook:

Teaching Assistant:

Grading & Due Dates (Tentative- will be finalized by the 1st day of the class):

Assignments	40%	4-6 assignments (some maybe group and some solo)
Exams (2-3 exams)	60%	No makeup exams will be given if you do not show up in the exams, unless it has been an emergency health related matter, in which case you need to bring me a doctor note and contact me ASAP!

Assignments

Potential assignments are: 1)Database design for a given application; 2)Database implementation for a given database design: using the open source RDBMS, MySQL, and SQL, create the database, insert, delete, update and search for the data. 3)Search engine evaluation; 4) Implementation of a basic search enginei using Mysql (tentativeily); 5) Data Mining: Data preparation/pre-processing ; 6)Constructing a statistical model to mine the data (tentatively). Students may be called to give a demo for each of the assignments.

Tentative Course Outline:

Introduction to Information Systems
Introduction to Database Management Systems (RDBMS)
Relational data modeling and design
Structured query language (SQL)
Introduction to Data Warehousing
Introduction to Information Retrieval Systems
Overview of the architecture and components of search systems
Various techniques to pre-process and store documents
Various techniques to search for documents
Evaluate search results
Introduction to Data Mining
Various techniques to pre-process data
Various techniques to mine data (supervised and unsupervised)

Late Assignment Policy:

Assignments MUST be submitted on or before their due date. If you are not able to finish your assignment by the due date and time, simply submit whatever of the assignment you have done to get some points rather than a zero. The students are encouraged to re-work on the incomplete assignments within a week from the submission due. This does not change the grade for that assignment, however will be considered if the final grade is in border-line. Note that the re-submission must be a complete work of that project.

Academic Integrity:

Visit the Honor System Website at http://gervaseprograms.georgetown.edu/honor/