Weekly Schedule

The following is the weekly schedule for the course. We will complete the study of "classical" distributed database systems in the first two weeks. These are the only weeks when I will be lecturing. The remainder of the time will be devoted to discussing more recent topics and your projects.

Please note: I have prepared a list of students taking the course. As people pick topics, we will fill these. To find a partner,

Lecture contents

Each week, we will tackle about three "lines of research". Lines of research is a vague term that I am using on purpose to roughly represent one approach to solving a particular problem. For example, there may be different projects that propose different approaches and each project represents one "line of research". The objective is to study multiple aspects of a topic by considering different perspectives.

Mechanics

For each line of research, I will indicate the material that you need to read. Each topic will be presented by a group of two students (choose your partner yourself). Each presentation will be 30 minutes followed by 30 minutes of discussion (we may have to adjust these times based on enrollment). Here's how the mechanics will work (these have been adopted - sometimes taken verbatim - from the requirements of a course that Prof. Stan Zdonik taught at Brown):

One team will be responsible for presenting a summary of the topic based on the readings.  This can largely be derived from the assigned readings, but you are encouraged to go beyond these to discover other interesting work within the same "line of research".  Remember that the last thing in the world that we are looking for is a linear presentation of the sections in the papers.  Part of the message should be a description of how you think that the topic at hand relates to Web data management (very broadly defined).  This team will try to present the area in the best possible light.  You guys are the cheerleaders for the approach.

Another team will be assigned the job of being the discussants.  Discussants will present a short rebuttal to the presenters talk.  They will also come to class prepared with questions, counterexamples, and a generally crabby attitude toward the work.  With any luck, this will set up a debate-like atmosphere in which we can argue about the pros and cons of the basic technologies.

The rest of you are not off the hook.  You are expected to actively participate in the debate.  Also, in order to ensure that you read the papers and think about the issues before coming to class, everyone who is not a presenter or a discussant will write a brief position paper which captures your own thoughts about the readings.  These should not be longer than 2 pages in length and should reflect your views on the paper(s), not a rehash of their contents. Please note that I am expecting one position paper-per-presented paper (not one 2 page position paper for all three papers presented in one week).

It is unlikely that we will be able to accommodate everyone as a presenter; so each of you will either be a presenter or a discussant. If you are a presenter or a discussant, you will write a critique (see the guidelines) of the area/paper(s) and this will count towards one of your paper critique requirements.

Week 1 - September 11, 2002

Distributed data management fundamentals (architectures, data placement, query optimization)

Week 2 - September 18, 2002

Distributed transaction processing, concurrency control, recovery, interoperability

Week 3 - September 25, 2002

Web data management fundamentals

Week 4 - October 2, 2002 - Paper Presentations

Talk 1:

Talk 2:

Talk 3:

Week 5 - October 9, 2002 - Paper Presentations

Talk 4:

Talk 5:

Talk 6:

Week 6 - October 16, 2002 - Paper Presentations

Talk 7:

Talk 8:

Talk 9:

Week 7 - October 23, 2002 - Paper Presentations

Talk 10:

Talk 11:

Talk 12:

Week 8 - October 30, 2002 - Paper Presentations

Talk 13:

Talk 14:

Talk 15:

Week 9 - November 6, 2002 - No class

Week 10 - November 13, 2002 - No class

Week 11 - November 20, 2002 - Research Presentations

Week 12 - November 27, 2002 - Research Presentations

 

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