CS 410 Homework 0:

Initial Project Ideas

Released: 22 January 2015
Due: 29 January 2015 by 11:59pm
Type: individual assignment

Intro

Innovations are often motivated by a dissatisfaction with our current living environment and a vision
about how to address this dissatisfaction and change our world for the better. For example, the visionary
article As We May Think written by Vannevar Bush in 1945 stimulated research in information retrieval
in early days. The Memex machine vision laid out in this article was based on an analysis of the world
then, which led to the recognition of many inadequacies of the conventional library systems in helping
a researcher to collect, select, and digest all the accumulated knowledge in the world. The Memex
machine was then designed to remove these inadequacies.
A good way to think about a topic such as this is to note that an information system is usually
determined by three elements:
users
data/information
task support (i.e. functions)
For example, in the case of a general Web search engine,
users = everyone
data = the whole Web
function = keyword search
If we vary these three variables, we will get interesting variations of systems, where often both new
challenges and new opportunities for improving the system service quality occur. For example, we may
assume users = children, then we have something like Google Kids where we should filter out pages
that are not appropriate for kids to read or difficult pages that are not understandable (readable) by
kids. If we assume that
users = everyone
data = text descriptions of all computer games (e.g. constructed by crawling the Web)
task = search,

well have a computer game search engine. Also, if we assume that function = learning, we would
have a system that helps users learn about a subject from the Web. It is not immediately clear how we
should design such a Web-based tutoring system, but one can clearly imagine many ways to improve
over Google for this purpose. For example, allowing a user to see definitions/explanations of any term
would be very useful. Also, tutorials or ppt slides may be more useful than regular home pages. In
general, Web search can be improved by considering specialized users, specialized data/information,
and more advanced functions for information access. A good way to brainstorm topics is to start with
the current Web search engines and identify where users are not satisfied. If you can come up with a
wish list of features for Web search, then you can easily convert them into interesting project topics.
Another way to think about it is to consider the needs of yourself and people around you. Can
we do a better job to improve the way we access, manage, and utilize information? We all need to
write research papers/reports, can we develop some tool to help us specifically in writing a paper?
For example, the tool may automatically fetch related work from the Web or a digital library. How to
improve our own UIUC library system is another direction to think about. In terms of functions, in
general, we can think about how to move beyond search toward information access.
Search is just one way to access information. What about information recommendation? What
about allowing a user to find information flexibly in multiple ways (browsing + search + recommendation)? How can we better present search results? We can also further think about how to move
beyond information access to task support or decision-making support. For example, many users use
a Web search engine to find information about products to help optimizing their purchasing decisions.
How can we best help such users more directly to finish their tasks? Systems like Google Products and
Orbitz have been designed for this purpose. Can we do better? Many people want to compare products,
can we pull out reviews about similar products and generate a comparative summary to help people
compare these products? Information integration is another major line of directions. We currently have
two extremes: either search the entire Web or search a specific website. Can we provide some federated
search portal that would allow us to search all the computer science department websites? How do we
integrate the search results and present them in a useful way to users in such a case? For example, can
we generate a comprehensive summary of all the Ph.D. programs in Computer Science?

Task

Do a similar analysis of the world today in terms of information services provided to people by a search
engine like Google, identify some major limitations, and write a short essay (with 500 to 1000 words)
to analyze the limitations and discuss possible ways to break these limitations and thus improve a current
search engine. While there are many ways to improve current search engines, you are also encouraged
to envision a new system very different from the current search engines with ideas that go beyond search
to help people access information in other ways or better support users in decision making.
If you cannot seem to come up with ideas, you can try to identify a specific (difficult) query that
doesnt seem to work well on Google. You can then try to analyze the reason why the query doesnt
work well, and discuss how you can possibly improve the search engine based on your analysis.
This exercise is intended to lead you to start thinking about what you can do for your course projects.
Your real course project doesnt have to follow the idea(s) that you discuss in this essay, though; as time
goes and you learn more about the topic, you might have other ideas for your project or you might want
to work with others on a joint project.

Submission

Your essay will be graded as either fail or pass based on the length of the essay. Your essay should
contain at least 500 words to get full marks. You will need to submit using both SVN and the wiki. The
SVN submission is for grading, and the wiki version is for reading others essays and commenting.
Remember, this is an individual assignment. Each student needs to write and submit their own
essay.

3.1

Turn in on SVN

The following instructions explain how to submit the assignment on SVN using an EWS linux machine.
You can use the same commands on your own machine if it supports SVN.
You will upload a text file of your essay to your SVN account. Your text file must be called
essay.txt. Do not call it essay.TXT, Essay.txt, etc. Use the following command to push your
essay to the SVN server: (replace NETID with your actual netid!)

svn import essay.txt \

https://subversion.ews.illinois.edu/svn/sp15-cs410/NETID/essay.txt \
-m "submit essay"
If you want to reupload the file, run the following command to delete the existing file.

svn rm \
https://subversion.ews.illinois.edu/svn/sp15-cs410/NETID/essay.txt \
-m "delete essay"
Once its removed, you can resubmit the file with the first command.
To make sure your essay was submitted correctly, visit https://subversion.ews.illinois.
edu/svn/sp15-cs410/NETID/essay.txt and view your essay in your browser.

3.2

Add to Wiki

Go to https://wiki.cites.illinois.edu/wiki/display/timanpub/CS410S15+Project+topics.
In the pane on the left side of the page, click Create child page, and select Blank page, then click the
Create button. Give the page a title relevant to your essay or project idea, including your netid. Paste
the text into the body of the page. Your page will then be able to be seen as a child page from the first
page.
Feel free to read others essays and comment on them using the wiki.

Notice

We may use your essays as data for future assignments this semester. Therefore, please do not include
any personally identifiable information in the essay if you do not wish it to be viewed by others. Additionally, since you are publishing your essays on the wiki, they can be seen by others in the class.