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Spring 2009 Reading List for the DAIS Qualifying Examination

I. Information Retrieval

  • Basic concepts
    • Vector-space retrieval model, TF-IDF weighting, relevance/pseudo feedback, query expansion, mean average precision (MAP), normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG), query-likelihood retrieval model, language model smoothing, PageRank, inverted index
  • Background
    • Amit Singhal, Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview, IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 24(4), pages 35-43, 2001.

Link: http://singhal.info/ieee2001.pdf

    • Chris Manning, Prabhakar Raghaven, Hinrich Schutze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, 2008. (Chapter 8 Evaluation in IR, Chapters 21 Link Analysis)

Link: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/pdf/irbookonlinereading.pdf

    • ChengXiang Zhai, Statistical Language Models for Information Retrieval, Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2008. (Chapter 1 Introduction, Chapter 2 Overview of IR Models, and Chapter 3 Simple Query Likelihood Retrieval Model).

Link: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00158ED1V01Y200811HLT001

·      More advanced topics

    • G. Cong et al., Finding question-answering pairs from online forums, Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2008, pages 467-474.

Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390415

    • Y. Wang et al., Exploring traversal strategy for web forum crawling, Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2008, pages 459-466.

Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390413

    • Z. Xu and R. Akella, A new probabilistic retrieval model based on the Dirichlet compound multinominal distribution, Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2008, pages 427-434.

Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390334.1390408

    • S. R. K. Branavan et al., Generating a Table-of-Contents, Proceedings of ACL 2007, pages 544-551.

Link: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P07/P07-1069.pdf

II. Data Mining and Data Warehousing

  • Basic Concepts
    • Data warehousing: star schema, data cube (be able to list half a dozen typical data cube computation methods), multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP)
    • Data mining: frequent pattern mining (be able to list half a dozen typical methods), sequential pattern mining (be able to list at four or five typical methods), correlation analysis, classification (be able to list half a dozen typical methods), clustering (be able to list half a dozen typical methods)
  • Background
    • J. Han and M. Kamber, Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 2nd edition. Chapters 3 & 4 (for data warehousing); Chapters 2, 5-7 (for data mining). Morgan Kaufmann 2006.
  • More advanced topics
    • Data Warehousing:
      1. Prediction cubes. Chen, Chen, Lin, and Ramakrishnan. VLDB 2005. [pdf]
      2. ARCube: Supporting Ranking Aggregate Queries in Partially Materialized Data Cubes. Wu, Xin, and Han. SIGMOD 2008. [pdf]
    • Data Mining:
      1. Mining Colossal Frequent Patterns by Core Pattern Fusion. Zhu et al.  ICDE 2007. [pdf]
      2. SCAN: A Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks. Xu et al.  KDD 2007. [acm]
      3. Direct Discriminative Pattern Mining for Effective Classification. Cheng, Yan, Han, and Yu. ICDE 2008. [pdf]

III. Database Management Systems

  • Basic concepts
    • Hardware: disk sector, track, block, seek, latency, how to lay out a database page
    • Data modeling: ER, OO, and Object-Relational approaches
    • Concurrency control and recovery: ACID, serializability, two-phase locking, two-phase commit, logging and recovery, the impact of data replication
    • Theory: normalization, dependencies
    • Queries: access methods (hashing, B-trees, multidimensional access methods), how to optimize a query, SQL
    • Benchmarks: TPC-C and TPC-H
  • Background
    You can use any database textbook you like to study the most basic of the concepts listed above; for example, CS411 teaches these concepts. (Note that you will be expected to be able to demonstrate your understanding of the concepts by applying them (as opposed to simply being able to define them).) In the remaining entries, "RDS" refers to Stonebraker's Readings in Database Systems.
    • Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems. Hellerstein et al.  VLDB 1995 and RDS. [pdf] We include this paper as the reference for multidimensional access methods; access methods based on B-trees and hashing should be covered in any database textbook.
    • New TPC Benchmarks for Decision Support and Web Commerce. Poess and Floyd. SIGMOD Record 29(4), December 2000. [pdf]
    • Inclusion of New Types in Relational Data Base Systems. Stonebraker. ICDE 1986 and RDS. [acm] We include this paper as your reference for understanding the impact of extensibility (as, for example, intended by the object-relational model) on a DBMS.
  • More advanced topics
    Please note that databases are a very broad field. The papers listed here will be changed frequently, to reflect this breadth.
    • Database Core
      • Scalable Approximate Query Processing with the DBO Engine. Jermaine, Arumugam, Pol, and Dobra.  SIGMOD 2007. [acm]
      • Compiling Mappings to Bridge Applications and Databases. Melnik, Adya, and Bernstein.  SIGMOD 2007. [acm]
    • Information Systems
      • Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning.  Abadi, Marcus, Madden, and Hollenbach.  VLDB 2007. [pdf]
      • iTrails: Pay-as-you-go Information Integration in Dataspaces. Salles et al.  VLDB 2007. [pdf]

IV. Bioinformatics

  • Basic Concepts
    • Sequence alignment
    • Motif finding and regulatory sequence analysis
    • Gene prediction
    • DNA sequencing
    • Phylogenetic tree reconstruction
    • Gene expression analysis
    • Clustering of biological data
  • Background
    • Biological sequence analysis---probabilistic models of proteins and nucleic acids, by Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison. Read Chapters 2 (Pairwise alignment), 3 (Markov chains and hidden Markov models), and 8.1-8.5 (Probabilistic approaches to phylogeny).
  • More advanced topics
    • Combining phylogenetic and hidden Markov models in biosequence analysis. Siepel and Haussler.  RECOMB 2003. [acm]
    • Predicting expression patterns from regulatory sequence in Drosophila segmentation. Segal, Raveh-Sadka, Schroeder, Unnerstall & Gaul. Nature 451, pp. 535-540 (31 January 2008). [html]
    • Informative priors based on transcription factor structural class improve de novo motif discovery. Narlikar et al. Bioinformatics. 2006. [pdf]

 

 


DAIS - Database and Information Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 201 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana, IL 61801, USA.  Fax: 217-265-6494, Phone: 217-244-6241.