Course info

Description
The amount of digital information on the web is growing at an explosive pace. People, organizations and corporations are continuously adding different types of information to the web, they are connecting to each other on the web, they collaborates on tasks via the web, and they are logging how users view and interact with the web. Web Intelligence is the application of machine intelligence to the web in a broad sense. It combines theories and techniques from information retrieval, network science and machine learning.

While nominally concerned with the "web", the techniques introduced in this course are widely applicable to information and data resources that have a network structure, such as social networks (Facebook, Twitter, ...),  networks of customers and products on e-commerce platforms, or networks of documents linked by citations. Core topics that will be covered in the course include:

• Information retrieval, search, and ranking
• Social network analytics
• Information diffusion on networks
• Neural network approaches for prediction on networks
  
• Recommender systems

Organization

The course is designed to cover 5 ECTS. It will consist of 11 lectures of two hours, each followed by a two hours exercise session. Deeper, hands-on experience with the techniques covered in the course is obtained in 10 self-study sessions of four hours each. There will not be a  hand-in deliverable for the self studies, but the contents of the self studies will be part of the exam pensum. All material used in the course will be in English and will be made available through Moodle. Lectures will be given in English.

The exact form of the exam will be determined once it is known how many students participate in the course, and what rules and regulations will apply regarding conducting of exams with or without physical presence.