Information Course Schedule fall 2006

Upper-Division

Surveying history through the lens of information and information through the lens of history, this course looks across time to consider what might distinguish ours as “the information age” and what that description implies about the role of “information technology” across time. We will select moments in societies’ development of information production, circulation, consumption, and storage from the earliest writing and numbering systems to the world of Social Media. In every instance, we’ll be concerned with what and when, but also with how and why. Throughout we will keep returning to questions about how information-technological developments affect society and vice versa?

MW 4-5:30 — 277 Cory Hall
Instructor(s): Paul Duguid, Geoffrey Nunberg

Three hours lecture per week. Focus on European Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, and in the western United States, Asian Americans and Chicano/Latinos. The course explores the nature of oral and print societies as found in the focus cultures to assess the impact of the dominant print culture on oral cultures. Image in woodcut and engraving as information and propaganda. The role of education in achieving literacy. The emergence of an African American press in the 19th century, tied to growing politcal support from the abolitionist press, is in striking contrast to the nearly invisible Native American voice confined to the reservation. San Francisco is a case study of the early emergence of a multicultural print and education environment, followed by restrictive laws, propaganda, and educational system that enforced cultural standardization and use of English. Printing technology tends toward centralization, standardization, and few participants, an environment that inhibits the voices of a multicultural, multilingual population. This course satisfies the American cultures requirement.

MWF 11-12 — 123 Wheeler Hall
Instructor(s): Mary Kay Duggan

Graduate

15 weeks; 3 hours of lecture per week. This course introduces the intellectual foundations of information organization and retrieval: conceptual modeling, semantic representation, vocabulary and metadata design, classification, and standardization, as well as information retrieval practices, technology, and applications, including computational processes for analyzing information in both textual and non-textual formats.

TuTh 9-10:30 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Robert Glushko

7 weeks - 4 hours of laboratory per week. This course introduces software skills used in building prototype scripts for applications in data science and information management. The course gives an overview of procedural programming, object-oriented programming, and functional programming techniques in the Python scripting language, together with an overview of fundamental data structures, associated algorithms, and asymptotic performance analysis. Students will watch a set of instructional videos covering material and will have four hours of laboratory-style course contact each week.

Lecture TuTh 12:30-2 / Lab W 12-1 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): John Chuang
Three hours of lecture per week. An introduction to services science — a new, interdisciplinary field that combines social science, business, and engineering knowledge needed for organizations (private, public, or nonprofit) to succeed in the shift to the service and information-based economy. A survey of (1) the historical, economic, and theoretical foundations of the rise of the service economy, (2) the analysis and design of services, (3) the technology and implementation of services, and (4) the delivery of services.
TuTh 3:30-5 — 202 South Hall

This course addresses concepts and methods of user experience research, from understanding and identifying needs, to evaluating concepts and designs, to assessing the usability of products and solutions. We emphasize methods of collecting and interpreting qualitative data about user activities, working both individually and in teams, and translating them into design decisions. Students gain hands-on practice with observation, interview, survey, focus groups, and expert review. Team activities and group work are required during class and for most assignments. Additional topics include research in enterprise, consulting, and startup organizations, lean/agile techniques, mobile research approaches, and strategies for communicating findings.

TuTh 2-3:30 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Nancy Van House

Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Graduate standing. As it's generally used, "information" is a collection of notions, rather than a single coherent concept. In this course, we'll examine conceptions of information based in information theory, philosophy, social science, economics, and history. Issues include: How compatible are these conceptions; can we talk about "information" in the abstract? What work do these various notions play in discussions of literacy, intellectual property, advertising, and the political process? And where does this leave "information studies" and "the information society"?

W 10-1 — 110 South Hall
Instructor(s): Paul Duguid, Geoffrey Nunberg

Three hours of lecture per week. The philosophical, legal, historical, and economic analysis of the need for and uses of laws protecting intellectual property. Topics include types of intellectual property (copyright, patent, trade secrecy), the interaction between law and technology, various approaches (including compulsory licensing), and the relationship between intellectual property and compatibility standards.

M 9-12 — 110 South Hall

Three hours of lecture. The Extensible Markup Language (XML), with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for metadata and information models, is the key enabling technology for information services and document-centric business models that use the Internet and its family of protocols. This course introduces XML syntax, transformations, schema languages, and the querying of XML databases. It balances conceptual topics with practical skills for designing, implementing, and handling conceptual models as XML schemas.

Lecture TuTh 2-3:30 (Aug 29 - Oct 19) / Lab M 12:30-2 — Lecture 110 South Hall / Lab 210 South Hall
Instructor(s): Erik Wilde

Three hours of lecture per week. Letter grade to fulfill degree requirements. Prerequisites: Proficient programming in Python (programs of at least 200 lines of code), proficient with basic statistics and probabilities. This course examines the state-of-the-art in applied Natural Language Processing (also known as content analysis and language engineering), with an emphasis on how well existing algorithms perform and how they can be used (or not) in applications. Topics include part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, text classification, information extraction, incorporation of lexicons and ontologies into text analysis, and question answering. Students will apply and extend existing software tools to text-processing problems.

MW 10:30-12 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Marti Hearst

Three hours of lecture per week. Introduction to relational, hierarchical, network, and object-oriented database management systems. Database design concepts, query languages for database applications (such as SQL), concurrency control, recovery techniques, database security. Issues in the management of databases. Use of report writers, application generators, high level interface generators.

TuTh 10:30-12 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Ray Larson
Three hours of lecture per week. Quantitative methods for data collection and analysis. Research design. Conceptualization, operationalization, measurement. Modes of data collection, including experiments, survey research, observation. Sampling. Basics of data analysis.
MW 2-3:30 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Doug Tygar

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 7
Tu 6-9 — C330 Cheit
Instructor(s): Reza Moazzami

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 15
Tu 4-6 — C230 Cheit
Instructor(s): Andrew Isaacs, Thomas Kalil

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 3
MW 9-10:30 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Erik Wilde

Weekly lecture by outside guests on topics relevant to students interested in Services Science, Management and Engineering. Grade or pass fail - may not be repeated for credit.

Section 16
Th 5-6 — 202 South Hall

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 8
MW 9:30-11 — 203 McLaughlin
Instructor(s): Paul Wright

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 13
M 12:30-2 — 107 South Hall
Instructor(s): Robert Glushko, Erik Wilde

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 11
W 2-4 — C330 Cheit
Instructor(s): Jihong Sanderson

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to an overview of the role of business and technology in poverty alleviation and sustainable development in developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America through:

  • understanding the key development challenges facing the developing world in the 21st Century;
  • identifying opportunities for sustainable business in developing countries, especially among the poor;
  • analyzing, from theory and practice, the link between technological innovation, entrepreneurship and sustainable development;
  • identifying and analyzing the prevailing features of the overall policy and reform environment that shape business and technology development in Africa, Asia and Latin America;
  • introducing and discussing foreign aid, trade and foreign direct investment as tools for developing capacity to do business for sustainable development;
  • building a higher level of generic expertise of what it takes to do business in developing countries;
  • understanding the role of public-private partnerships in sustainable development.
Section 18
Th 2-4 — C330 Cheit
Instructor(s): Theogene Rudasingwa

Special topics in information. Topics vary.

Section 19
M 12-2 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Jihong Sanderson

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 4
MW 9:30-11 — C220 Cheit
Instructor(s): Alice Agogino, Sara Beckman
Section 5
MW 11-12:30 — C220 Cheit
Instructor(s): Alice Agogino, Sara Beckman

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 12
TuTh 12:30-2 — 110 South Hall
Instructor(s): Coye Cheshire

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 9
M 6-9:30 — C330 Cheit
Instructor(s): Alex Angelus

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 17
TuTh 4-5:30 — C125 Cheit
Instructor(s): Reza Moazzami

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 6
MW 4-5:30 — C125 Cheit
Instructor(s): Andrew Isaacs

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 10
TuTh 4-5:30 — F320 Haas
Instructor(s): Kurt Keutzer

Specific topics, hours and credit may vary from section to section, year to year. May be repeated for credit with change in content.

Section 2
W 2-4 — 110 South Hall

Course may be repeated for credit. Three hours of lecture per week for five weeks.

Section 2
Tu 5-8 (Oct 3 to Oct 31) — 110 South Hall
Instructor(s): Quentin Hardy

One hour colloquium per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Ph.D. standing in the School of Information. Colloquia, discussion, and readings designed to introduce students to the range of interests of the school.

F 1-2:30 — 107 South Hall
Instructor(s): Paul Duguid

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

Section 3
F 9-12 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Xiao Qiang, Howard Rheingold

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

Section 1
F 3-5 — 107 South Hall

Topics in information management and systems and related fields. Specific topics vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit, with change of content. May be offered as a two semester sequence.

Section 2
M 4-6:30 — 202 South Hall
Instructor(s): Mitch Kapor, Pamela Samuelson