Information Retrieval (IR) is the discipline that studies the techniques and tools to search for relevant information in a large amount of data. The extensive use of IR systems for searching information in text, images and other multimedia data is one of the most remarkable success stories of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction.
 
This course is a natural follow-up to the course Foundations of Information Retrieval (201600076). In this course, students participate actively in the ongoing research at the University of Twente. The students work in small groups of 2-3 students on a practical and/or theoretical problem in the field of Information Retrieval. The students need to design, implement and evaluate a technical solution to the problem. Solutions can be tested using data from international evaluation activities such as the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) and the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) or validated using domain-specific metrics.
 
There will be three meetings during the course, one introductory meeting to explain the possible assignments and the organization of the course, and the other two will be used for the groups to present their intermediate progress or final results to the fellow students.
 
The course will be graded based on the quality of the work (solution design, implementation, evaluation and presentation) as determined through progress presentations, final demonstration and the report of the project. The data and the implementation will be published as open data and open source software.