Course schedule

Lectures take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:30 to 5:50pm in NVIDIA Auditorium, located in the basement of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center on campus. Lecture videos are recorded by SCPD and available to all enrolled students here.

Students are also expected to become familiar with the course material presented in a series of video lectures that are hosted on Coursera. Access the Coursera videos here (be sure to log in with your Stanford email account to get access).
Week Date Event Description & materials Readings & other resources
Week 1 Tues. 4/4 Lecture (Pandu) Introduction to the course

Coursera content:
  • Slides: Introduction
Thurs. 4/6 In-class lab (Chris) Merge algorithm for proximity queries using a positional index (starter code)

You will need the following Google doc during the in-class lab session: Postings list intersection class session

Coursera content:
Thurs. 4/6 PA1 released Programming assignment #1 released
Week 2 Tues. 4/11 Lecture (Pandu) Spelling correction

In-class lecture notes: Coursera content:
  • Videos: "Dictionaries and Tolerant Retrieval"
  • Slides: PPT | PDF/6 | PDF/1
Thurs. 4/13 In-class lab (Chris) Algorithms for postings list compression (starter code) (Google doc with class results)

Coursera content:
Thurs. 4/13 PS1 released Problem set #1 released [PS1 solution]
Thurs. 4/13 Query quiz released Query quiz released
Week 3 Tues. 4/18 Lecture (Chris) Probabilistic IR: the binary independence model

In-class lecture notes: Coursera content:
Thurs. 4/20 Lecture (Chris) Computing scores and BM25F

In-class lecture notes: Coursera content:
Thurs. 4/20 PA1 due Programming assignment #1 due
Thurs. 4/20 PA2 released Programming assignment #2 released
Week 4 Tues. 4/25 Lecture (Pandu) Evaluation methods & NDCG

In-class lecture notes: Coursera content:
Thurs. 4/27 Lecture (Pandu) Systems issues in efficient retrieval and scoring

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 4/27 PS1 due Problem set #1 due
Thurs. 4/27 Ranking quiz released Ranking quiz released
Week 5 Tues. 5/2 Guest lecture "Amazon Product Search: Search Relevance and Query Understanding"
Guest lecture by Ravi Jammalamadaka and Erick Cantu-Paz (Engineering Managers, Amazon Search)

NOTE: attendance required for on-campus students
Thurs. 5/4 Lecture (Chris) Text classification (Naive Bayes, kNN, decision boundaries)

In-class lecture notes: Coursera content:
  • Videos: "Naive Bayes"
Thurs. 5/4 PA2 due Programming assignment #2 due
Thurs. 5/4 PA3 released Programming assignment #3 released
Week 6 Tues. 5/9 Lecture (Chris) Text classification (Support vector machines)

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 5/11 Lecture (Chris) Learning to rank

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 5/11 PS2 released Problem set #2 released [PS2 solution]
Week 7 Tues. 5/16 Lecture (Chris) Distributed word representations for IR

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 5/18 Guest lecture Guest lecture by Jeff Dean (Google Senior Fellow)

NOTE: attendance required for on-campus students
Thurs. 5/18 PA3 due Programming assignment #3 due
Thurs. 5/18 PA4 released Programming assignment #4 released
Week 8 Tues. 5/23 Lecture (Pandu) Link analysis

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 5/25 In-class lab (Pandu) MapReduce with Java (Hadoop setup instructions) (starter code)

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 5/25 PS2 due Problem set #2 due
Week 9 Tues. 5/30 Lecture (Pandu) Crawling and near-duplicate pages

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 6/1 Lecture (Pandu) Personalization

In-class lecture notes:
Thurs. 6/1 PA4 due Programming assignment #4 due
Week 10 Tues. 6/6 Lecture (Chris) Question answering

In-class lecture notes:
Exam week Mon. 6/12 Final exam Alternate final exam (7:00-10:00pm)
Wed. 6/14 Final exam Final exam (3:30-6:30pm) Practice final (2016)
Practice final solutions