The course will present a series of face-to-face lectures introducing some basic IR terminology and concepts, and providing further a large spectrum of practical applications of IR within industrial settings, as well as within research institutions in the Netherlands. The introductory components of the course include representation of information needs and documents, retrieval models, clustering algorithms, text categorization. A variety of research topics on adaptive information retrieval, web-based IR and user interfaces and visualization for IR will be also studied in this course. The lectures will cover topics which will be further exercised and exemplified in practice within the final assignments. The assignments involve both analytical, design and implementation skills. Students are also expected to perform individual studies of literature on relevant research topics.

There is no exam for this course. In groups of three students will prepare one Final Assignment (FA) and will study relevant literature (LS). This will all build the final grade (FG) as follows:  FG = 0.30 LS + 0.70 FA

• complete and submit a final assignment;
• take an active part in the forum with respect to the individual literature study sessions;
  
• study the given course material and lecture presentations;
  
• follow all the lectures.