Description

Our life relies on a wide variety of software, particularly those on the web such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. More and more data is published and shared through the internet. These services gather, store, manipulate, and serve a huge amount of information. This Information Infrastructure course is one of the first steps to learn how to gather, store, manipulate, and serve information using the Python programming language.

Specific objectives


Basic information ↑

Syllabus
Print this page. Note that the contents may be updated throughout the course. Important updates will be announced.
Time & Location
Ballantine Hall (BH) 304
Monday & Wednesday 4pm-5:15pm
First meeting: Aug. 20th, 2012 (Monday)
Labs
LH 023
Thursday 1:00pm - 2:15pm (Andrew Hoffman)
Thursday 2:30pm - 3:45pm (Michael Keel and Paul Jenkins)
Thursday 4:00pm - 5:15pm (Paul Jenkins)
Announcements
You need to join the course mailing list to receive course announcements. Visit https://groups.google.com/d/forum/i211-2012f and join the group. You need to set the email setting to "Emails" (not abridged email or digest email) to receive announcements immediately. All announcements will be made through this mailing list. If you have any general question or would like to share something, please send an email to i211-2012f@googlegroups.com
Instructors
You may send any question to the instructor mailing list: i211-2012f-instructors@googlegroups.com

Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn (yyahn@indiana.edu)
Office: Informatics East Room 316
Phone: (812) 856 2920
Office hours: Monday 11am - noon
(you can also schedule a meeting if you cannot make for this time slot)

Chao Ji (jic@indiana.edu)
Office hours: Tuesday 10am - 12pm at LH 325

Andrew Hoffman (hoffmaae@indiana.edu)
Office hours: Tuesday 1pm - 2pm at Info West 001

Michael Keel (mjkeel@indiana.edu)
Office hours: Tuesday 2pm - 3pm at Info West 001

Paul Jenkins (pauljenk@indiana.edu)
Office hours: Tuesday 3pm - 5pm at Info West 001

Textbook
No textbook is required. See Resources.
Prerequisites
It is assumed that you have taken either I210, C211, or equivalent.

Schedule ↑

WeekDatesTopics Course material and useful resources Lab
1 8/20, 22 Introduction, administrivia, and programming environments Python Should I learn programming? Command line interface Internet Editors (on servers) Friendly editors for local machines Python shell on the web No labs
2 8/27, 29 Basic data types Website example Numbers, strings, lists, dictionaries, and variables Further readings on dictionaries Internet and the web Assignment 1 (due: 9/4 11pm)
9/3: No class (Labor day)
3 9/5 Strings, files, and control statements Mutable vs. immutable String formatting and manipulations Files Assignment 2 (due: 9/11 11pm)
4 9/10, 12 Functions and modules Built-in functions Functions More on functions and functional programming Modules Namespace __name__ List comprehension Assignment 3 (due: 9/18 11pm)
5 9/17, 19 Classes, OOP, error handling OOP 'self' Bugs More on debugging and testing Assignment 4 (due: 9/25 11pm)
6 9/24, 26 OOP, Internet, and Web Programming languages. How to learn them. Python modules Scope Errors and Exceptions Internet Assignment 4 continued; Midterm preparation
7 10/1 Web and HTML; Review Hypertext Markup language Python httplib Assignment 5 (due: 10/9 11pm)
10/3: Mid term exam
8 10/8, 10 HTTP, Web crawler, and API HTTP Web crawling URLlib XML JSON API Assignment 6 (due: 10/16 11pm)
9 10/15, 17 Databases and SQL Databases API ETC. Assignment 7 (due: 10/23 11pm)
10 10/22, 24 Database security, Encoding, MapReduce, and CGI Encoding SQL injection Map and Reduce CGI Assignment 8 (due: 10/30 11pm)
11 10/29, 31 CGI, Cron, NoSQL (MongoDB), and Regular expression SQL injection CGI Cron MongoDB Regular Expression Assignment 9 (due: 11/6 11pm)
12 11/5, 7 Visualization, MVC framework Visualization MVC framework Encoding detection Final project ideas Assignment 10 (due: 11/13 11pm)
13 11/12, 14 Web frameworks, Cloud computing Web frameworks Clouds Linux permission, path, and executable scripts Final project
11/18-25: Thanksgiving
15 11/26, 28 Web frameworks, cloud computing UML AWS Crowdsourcing WSGI Final project
16 12/3, 5 Review Final project
12/12: All late assignments due
12/14: Final project due

Policies ↑

Class policies

Final Projects (Due 12/14)

The aim of the final project is synthesizing various aspects of information infrastructure that you have been studying throughout the course to build an actual system that gather, store, process, and serve information and data. You can do either a standard project or a challenge projet.
Standard project
You will build a twitter sentiment analyzer.
Challenge project
You will design your own system. The only requirement is having the four elements of information infrastructure. You should contact the instructor with your ideas and designs.
There will be extra credits for incorporating extra elements in any aspect of the system. Some examples: you can grab another data source and perform interesting analyses by combining it with the twitter data. You can put a google map and combine it with twitter location data. You can do more textual analyses.

Academic integrity

The principles of academic honesty and ethics will be enforced. Any cases of academic misconduct (cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, etc) will be thoroughly investigated and immediately reported to the School and the Dean of Students. You should actively discuss with others, but you should write your own code (report). Credit all the sources (discussion with other students, used softwares, etc).

Grading policy

Class participation mainly concerns attendance to the class, labs, and in-class activities.

Mid-term exam will consist of multiple-choice and short answer questions and they will be about course material we covered and lab assignments.

You will get an F grade if you fail to submit the final project.

Resources ↑

Books

Links

Past I211 courses

Relevant courses in other places