Personal repository of Information Retriaval and Data Visualization course of DSSC MSc @ UniTS/SISSA

CFU: 6

Information Retrieval: The course will provide both a theoretical and practical introduction to the concept of information retrieval. You will learn how to efficiently search among large collections of documents and how to rank the documents found.

• Knowledge and understanding: After the course you will be able to understand how an information retrieval system works, which different models are available and how its performances can be evaluated.
• Applying knowledge and understanding: You will be able to decide how to implement and evaluate an information retrieval system for a given task.
• Communication skills: You will be able to describe how an information retrieval system works and explain the design choices made.
• Learning skills: You will be able to follow and learn new information retrieval techniques.

The final project required for the exam can be found here

Data Visualization: This course will provide the knowledge and practical skills necessary to develop a strong foundation on data visualization. You will learn how to visualize data in order to support reasoning in data analysis and communicate information to others.

• Knowledge and understanding: You will understand the basic concepts and mechanisms of data visualization. By studying human perceptual/cognitive processing and the properties of different visual channels, you will be able to make informed decisions about visualization design. You will be able to discern between trustworthy and misleading visualizations and will learn how to design visualizations in Python.
• Applying knowledge and understanding: You will be able to handle data and choose an appropriate way to represent it in order to design an effective visualization for the given task.
• Communication skills: You will learn how to make efficient presentations.
• Learning skills: You will be able to upgrade your knowledge on specific aspects of data visualization using online resources and tools.

• Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Freely available at: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/
• Andy Kirk, Data Visualization: A Handbook for Data Driven Design, SAGE Publications, London, 2016.
• Tamara Munzner, Visualization Analysis & Design, CRC Press, 2014.
• A K Peters Visualization Series, CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2014.
• Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, 2015.