CS511 Proof-of-Attendance Quiz (due Dec. 9, 2006, Sat, 11:59PM CST)

Having a mixture of local students and online students makes it hard to check who has actually attended the class each time, where "attended" means either coming to the class physically or viewing the lecture video. The purpose of this quiz is for you to prove that you have actually attended the lectures in the second half of the semester as these lectures are not covered in any exam or homework.

The quiz consists of a set of short questions. These questions are designed so that you can easily answer them if you have attended all the lectures.

Please email your answers to the instructor (czhai AT uiuc.edu) before Dec. 9, 2006, Saturday, 11:59pm CST. Your answers will not be graded with points; instead, it will be one of the factors that I will use to grade your attendance of the class.

1. In which lecture was "Skyline queries" mentioned?
2. In which lecture was "Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) mentioned?
3. Briefly explain what is "RoadRunner".
4. What is a "star schema"? Name another schema discussed in the same class.
5. What does "synopsis" mean in the context of our lectures?
6. What does DHT stand for in the context of our lectures? In which class was it discusssed?
7. What is schema matching? In which university was the LSD method developed?
8. Use no more than two sentences to describe one reason why object-oriented databases haven't been as successful as object-relational databases.
9. Give three special characteristics of semi-structured data that make it differ from the traditional relational data.
10. Use no more than two sentences to explain what is TF-IDF weighting.
11. Use no more than two sentences to describe one reason why we need to do smoothing when using language models for retrieval.
12. What kind of index is typically used in an information retrieval system such as Google?