Semester II, 2000-2001 (Thursday 2 pm - 4 pm, LT33)

Last update: Wednesday, 11-Apr-2001 13:30:53 +08

Table of Contents

• Announcements
• General Information
• Brief Course Outline
• Course Material
• Tutorial Information
• Class Schedule
• Frequently Asked Questions

Announcements

• 11-04-2001:

  Tutorial marks are now available.

• 10-04-2001:

  Some continuous assessment related announcements:

  1. The grading of assignments 2 and 3 has been completed. Please collect your assignment from Mr. Wang JiHua outside the "Multimedia Information Lab" (S17 #04-33) during the following time-periods:

           Tue (10th): 4pm - 6pm
           Wed (11th): 4pm - 6pm
           Thu (12th): 4pm - 6pm
           Sat (14th): 9am - 11am
     

  2. The relative weights of the three assignments (for the 25% of the grade) is in the ratio

                 as1:as2:as3::10:10:5
     

  3. Each assignment has been graded on a scale of 0-10.

• 03-02-2001:

  The tutorial schedule has been modified. There will be no tutorials in the week of March 5 but there will a tutorial in the week of April 2.

• 19-01-2001:

  The Chinese New Year week tutorials (Tutorial 2) have been rescheduled to:

  1. Group 3 on Saturday (3-2-2001) at 10am-11am @ TR7
  2. Group 4 on Saturday (3-2-2001) at 11am-12pm @ TR7
  3. Group 5 on Saturday (3-2-2001) at 12pm-01pm @ TR7
  4. Group 6 on Tuesday (23-1-2001) at 09am-10am @ TR1
  The groups 1, 2, 7, 8, 9 & 10 will run as usual.

• 08-01-2001: The lecture-theatre has now been changed to LT33
• 04-01-2001: The entire set of course notes has been placed in the coop

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General Information

Lecturer: Mohan S Kankanhalli

Teaching Assistant: Sabu Emmanuel

Aims and Objectives:

This course introduces concepts, issues, design and implementation of hypermedia systems. The media to be considered include text, digital audio, digital image and digital video. At the end of this course, the students should have the expertise and competence to design, implement and deploy hypermedia systems.

Brief Description:

Hypermedia is a technology that organizes information as a collection of independent nodes, which are connected through links. It supports a navigational approach of accessing information. This module presents techniques for the representation, storage, interaction and access of digital multimedia information in the hypermedia form. This module also covers related topics on the encoding and processing of digital multimedia information. The module covers basic structure of hypermedia systems, World-Wide-Web, characteristics of digital multimedia data: text, image, video & audio, encoding standards in digital multimedia: JPEG, MPEG, and constructs of hypermedia systems.

Tutorials: 5%
Assignments: 25%
Midterm Exam: 20% [open book]
Final Exam: 50% [open book]

Pre-requisites: CS2105 (Computer Communication Networks)

Office consultation hours:

• Mohan Kankanhalli Thu 4pm - 6pm (S17 #04-19)
• Sabu Emmanuel Wed 2pm - 4pm (S15 #04-12)

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Brief Course Outline

I. Introduction to Hypermedia Systems (2 hrs)
Background; history; world-wide-web; basic concepts

II. Text Data (2 hrs)
SGML concepts; HTML; XML

III. Digital Audio (2 hrs)
Audio fundamentals; PCM; MPEG audio

IV. Digital Images (4 hrs)
Digital image concepts; GIF images; The JPEG compression standard

V. Digital Video (4 hrs)
Basic concepts; The MPEG1 compression standard; MPEG2 concepts

VI. Hypermedia Models (2 hrs)
The WWW Model

VII. Backend Issues (8 hrs)
Scalability Issues; Caching; Copyright protection; Security

VIII. The Web & the Future (2 hrs)
New developments; Future trends

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Course Material

Copies of slides will be made available. Please check this course web-site regularly. A copy of all the relevant material will be put in the coop. Please note that I cannot put up some of the material on-line because of copyright reasons (material and figures used from other sources).

Supplementary material will greatly facilitate your grasp of the particular topic and will help provide a deeper understanding of the lecture content. However, this material may contain advanced concepts not covered in the lecture. But as far as exams are concerned, you are responsible only for the material covered in the class.

• Lecture 1: Slides (some figs missing)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • V. Bush, "As We May Think" The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
    • T. Nelson, "Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More Than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning and Deep Re-use".
• Lecture 2: Slides (available in the coop)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • J. Bosak & T. Bray, "XML and the Second-generation Web, Scientific American, May 1999.
    • L. Bouthillier, Synchronized Multimedia on the Web (an excellent example of successful use of XML)
• Lecture 3: Slides (partial & without figs)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • D.Y. Pan, "Digital Audio Compression", Digital Technical Journal, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 28-40, 1993.
• Lecture 4: Slides
  • Supplementary reading:
    • T.D. Schneider, " Information Theory Primer".
• Lecture 5: Slides (without some figs)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • G.K. Wallace, "The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 30-44, 1991.
• Lecture 6: Slides (partial)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • D. Le Gall, "MPEG: A Video Compression Standard for Multimedia Applications", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 46-58, 1991.
• Lecture 7: Slides (available in the coop)
• Lecture 8: Slides (available in the coop)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • R. Clarke, A Primer on Internet Technology
• Lecture 9: Slides (available in the coop)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • V. Pai, M. Aron, G. Banga, M. Svendsen, P. Druschel, W. Zwaenepoel & E. Nahum, "Locality-Aware Request Redistribution in Cluster-based Network Servers", Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, October 1998.
    • A. Bestavros, M. Crovella, J. Liu & D. Martin, "Distributed Packet Rewriting and its Application to Scalable Server Architectures, Proceedings of the 1998 International Conference on Network Protocols.
• Lecture 10: Slides (available in the coop)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • J. Wang, "A Survey of Web Caching Schemes for the Internet", ACM Computer Communication Review, Vol. 29, No. 5, October 1999.
• Lecture 11: Slides (sans images)
  • Supplementary reading:
    • N. Johnson & S. Jajodia, "Exploring Steganography: Seeing the Unseen", IEEE Computer, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 26-34, Feb 1998.
• Lecture 12: Slides (available in the coop)
  • Supplementary reading:
• Lecture 13: Slides

Some Books:

Books which are useful to refer are listed below. You may consult them for better understanding but it is not necessary to buy them.

Reference Textbooks:

1. R. Steinmetz, K. Nahrstedt (1995), Multimedia: Computing, Communications & Applications, Prentice Hall International.
[A general reference for the course]

2. I. Witten, A. Moffat, T. Bell (1999), Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images, Morgan Kaufmann.
[A good book on compression and information retrieval]

Reference for SGML, HTML & XML:

1. M. Bryan (1997), SGML and HTML Explained, Addison Wesley.

2. B. Marchal (1999), XML by Example

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Tutorial Information

The class has been divided into 10 tutorial groups:

Group 1: Tue 10.00am to 11.00am (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 2: Tue 11.00am to 12.00noon (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 3: Wed 8.00am to 9.00am (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 4: Wed 9.00am to 10.00am (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 5: Wed 10.00am to 11.00am (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 6: Wed 11.00am to 12.00noon (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 7: Fri 2.00pm to 3.00pm (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 8: Fri 3.00pm to 4.00pm (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 9: Fri 4.00pm to 5.00pm (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))
Group 10: Fri 5.00pm to 6.00pm (TR7 (S17 4^th Floor))

  Tutorial 1: Tutorial on Intro + Text (Week of Jan 15^th)

  Tutorial 2: Tutorial on Digital Audio (Week of Jan 22^nd)

  Tutorial 3: Tutorial on Digital Images I (Week of Jan 29^th)

  Tutorial 4: Tutorial on Digital Images II (Week of Feb 5^th)

  Tutorial 5: Tutorial on Digital Video I (Week of Feb 12^th)

  Tutorial 6: Tutorial on Digital Video II (Week of Feb 26^th)

  Tutorial 7: Tutorial on Backend Issues I (Week of Mar 12^th)

  Tutorial 8: Tutorial on Backend Issues II (Week of Mar 19^th)

  Tutorial 9: Tutorial on Backend Issues III (Week of Mar 26^th)

  Tutorial 10: Tutorial on Backend Issues IV (Week of Apr 2^nd)

  Tutorial Solutions: (Brief answers)

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Class Schedule

4^th Jan (Week 1): Introduction to Hypermedia Systems

11^th Jan (Week 2): Text Data

  Assignment 1: Web assignment (Due Feb 2)

18^th Jan (Week 3): Digital Audio

20^th Jan (Week 4): Digital Images I   8.00am - 10.00am @ LT34   Note: make-up class for January 25^th

1^st Feb (Week 5): Digital Images II

  Assignment 2: Programming assignment I (Due Mar 2)

3^rd Feb (Week 6): Digital Video I   8.00am - 10.00am @ LT34   Note: make-up class for February 8^th

15^th Feb (Week 7): Digital Video II

17^th February AM: Midterm Examination  8.30am @ LT34

This will be an open-book exam and it will be based on the material covered till February 3 (which is Digital Video I).

21^st Feb Semester Break

1^st Mar (Week 8): Hypermedia Models

8^th Mar (Week 9): Backend Issues I (Scalability)

  Assignment 3: Programming assignment II (Due Mar 30)

15^th Mar (Week 10): Backend Issues II (Caching)

22^nd Mar (Week 11): Backend Issues III (Copyright protection)

29^th Mar (Week 12): Backend Issues IV (Security)

5^th Apr (Week 13): The Web & the Future

17^th Apr PM: Final Examination

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Frequently Asked Questions

Lecture 1 FAQ
Lecture 2 FAQ
Lecture 3 FAQ
Lecture 4 FAQ
Lecture 5 FAQ
Lecture 6 FAQ
Lecture 7 FAQ
Lecture 8 FAQ
Lecture 9 FAQ
Lecture 10 FAQ
Lecture 11 FAQ
Lecture 12 FAQ
Assignment 1 FAQ
Assignment 2 FAQ
Assignment 3 FAQ

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