CSE 490i - Advanced Internet Systems

490i will cover the latest techniques for building scalable Internet systems such as search engines, communities, customized portal sites, and electronic commerce platforms. Lectures will cover material from recent research papers in the field, and a sequence of group mini-projects will engage students in the practicalities of deploying successful sites.

Prereqs: 326, 341. Recommended: 444, 451, or 461; considerable experience building systems, and proficiency with Java. Preference given to seniors.

Instructor: Dan Weld, office hour: Fri 3:30, Sieg 408, or after class, or send email for appointment.
TA: Tessa Lau, office hour: Thursday 2:30, Sieg 226a, or by appointment.
Mailing list: cse490i@cs (archives)

Plan: the course is an experimental offering, and students are expected to help in the process. Because the material is so new, there is no textbook, and students will need to dig information out of what few primary references exist. Guest lecturers will provide diverse information and a variety of perspectives. In addition, there will be a heavy project component, making this midway between a regular CSE 4xx offering and a Capstone Design Course.

The Syllabus.

The list of Readings and References.

The list of Class Slides.

Links to the class Projects.

Project: We'll build an MP3-and-streaming-media crawler that populates a database which powers a website offering collaborative filtering customization. Students will work in groups of two or three on the project which is divided into four parts. Each project component takes 2.5 weeks to complete and builds upon the previous parts, yielding an impressive system by course end:

  1. (Due January 19, 2000). Use XSL to build a dynamic website presenting XML content about audio files which we'll provide.
  2. (Due February 4, 2000). Scale your site by storing the data in a relational database; use SQL and JDBC to provide comprehensive searching facilities to your site.
  3. (Due February 23, 2000). Build a crawler that extracts XML summaries of content available at sites like mp3.com, iuma.com, listen.com, musicsearch.com, audiofind.com, etc. Add to and update the database descriptions.
  4. (Due March 10, 2000). Extend your site in any way you please. One idea is to add collaborative filtering via Naive Bayes.


weld@cs.washington.edu