Health Data Analytics
Taught for the first time in Fall 2013, this was quite a fun course for me. Students were from computer science, engineering, informatics, medicine and included both graduates and senior undergraduates. The course is project centered. There were four projects a) replication of a study using clinicaltrials.gov b) i2b2 medication extraction from patient records c) CLEF: question answering from biomedical full texts and d) identifying drug effects from Twitter. Looking forward to offering it again.
Databases
This is a fairly standard CS course in databases. We go through all the usual phases for developing good databases: entity-relationship modeling, relational models, functional dependencies and normalization principles. We also study both relational algebra and calculus besides SQL. We also look at aspects such as transaction processing, concurrency, query optimization. There is a group project where the students are given a brief sketch of a design problem and asked to take it from design to a web based query interface. Students appear to enjoy the project on the whole.
Web Mining
This course is a cross between a seminar and project course. The focus is on current research and is by necessity selective given that web mining is a wide and variegated field. Some of the papers we cover include classic ones on the structure of the web, interesting applications such as the mining of sentiment and core efforts such as retrieval from the web including from specific portions such as social media. Emphasis is conference papers. Students take on a project with guidance provided on topic selection. This is semester length with milestones to cross during the semester. Some students have successfully published their projects from this course. This is open to graduates and undergraduate seniors.Courses Taught In Previous Years
Text Retrieval. A classic course in many a sense, including the fact that I have not had the opportunity to teach it in a few years. Provides a strong foundation in algorithms and design of text retrieval systems and approaches. Of course, one sees parts of it under many guises including web mining.