Ecommerce Technology (20-751)

OFFICIAL COURSE WEB PAGE

Mini 5 (Summer Mini 1) 2001

Administrative Information

For course policies and information about how to contact the instructor and teaching assistant, please see the Administrative Page.

Course Syllabus

Lecture 1 - OVERVIEW (Monday, May 8, 2000) – Course summary and objectives. Survey of ecommerce technology.  Note: viewing the course slides is easiest using Internet Explorer.   If you use Netscape, you will have to configure it to use PowerPoint when it sees a file with the extension .ppt.  Internet Explorer knows this already. View SLIDES.

Readings: Treese Ch. 1, 2.

Lecture 2 - THE INTERNET (Friday, May 12, 2000) – Examples of eCommerce.  Internet structure and statistics.   Bandwidth and internetworking. Packet switching, network addressing, routing, TCP/IP and the browser illusion.  View SLIDES.   HOMEWORK 1 AVAILABLE.

Readings: Treese Ch. 8.

Lecture 2a - THE INTERNET (Monday, May 15, 2000) – Examples of eCommerce.  Internet structure and statistics.   Bandwidth and internetworking. Packet switching, network addressing, routing, TCP/IP and the browser illusion.  View SLIDES.   HOMEWORK 1 AVAILABLE.

Lecture 3 - MOBILE E-BUSINESS (NOTE: Wednesday, May 17, 2000, 10:30 - 12:20 Posner 153) – eCommerce on the go: wireless and mobile systems, wirelss application protocol (WAP), quality of service (QoS), convergence of the Internet, the telephone system and the global positioning system (GPS).  View SLIDES.

Readings: Mobile Networking Through Mobile IP (Charles Perkins), Background of Quality of Service (IPHighway), Internet Protocol/Intelligent Network Integration Tutorial (IEC), The Global Positioning System (Aerospace Corp. 11-page pdf file).

Lecture 4 - WEB ARCHITECTURE (NOTE: Thursday, May 18, 2000, 8:30 - 10:20, Posner 152) – Structural design of eCommerce systems.   Client-server architecture, 2-, 3-,n-tier design, server farms, scalability.   Integration of legacy systems.  Java Beans, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java Server Pages (JSP).  Particular problems posed by 24/7operation and an open user community.  View SLIDES.

Readings: Treese Ch. 6, 9.  Also Client-Server Software Architectures (SEI), Enterprise JavaBeans Technology (Sun), History of Distributed Object Oriented Technologies (Metronet)

NOTE: NO CLASS ON MAY 19 BECAUSE OF FOREIGN STUDENT ORIENTATION

Lecture 5 - DATA INTERCHANGE (Monday, May 22, 2000).  Note: Class today is in Simon Auditorium, GSIA) – Exchanging data over the Internet.  XML, style sheets, document type definition (DTD), ASN.1, the Basic Encoding Rules.  View SLIDES.  Homework 1 due.  HOMEWORK 2 AVAILABLE.

Readings: XML: Structuring Data for the Web: An Introduction (Sall).  Also see ASN.1 links on the Ecommerce Technology page.

NOTE: THE NEXT CLASS IS NOT UNTIL JUNE 8, 2000

Lecture 6 - MULTIMEDIA (NOTE: Thursday, June 8, 2000, 8:30 - 10:20, Room 152).  – Methods of delivering graphics and video by computer.  Graphic formats, color representation, compression, LZW, GIF, MPEG, JPEG, streaming media. Plug-ins.   Homework 1 returned.  Homework 2 due.   View SLIDES.

Readings: Treese Ch. 11. HOMEWORK 3 AVAILABLE.

Lecture 8 - ACCESS SECURITY (June 9, 2000) – Classification of security threats and intrusion methods. Physical security and electronic security, firewalls.  Access controls, challenge-response systems, time-varying passwords. Denial of service (DOS) attacks.  Viruses and worms.  View SLIDES.

Readings: Treese Ch. 13.

Lecture 9 - CRYPTOGRAPHIC SECURITY (June 12, 2000) – Encryption, symmetric v. asymmetric systems, public-key cryptosystems, the RSA algorithm, digital signatures, digital certificates.  The public key infrastructure.  View SLIDES.

Readings: Treese Ch. 12.  HOMEWORK 4 AVAILABLE.

Lecture 10 - ELECTRONIC PAYMENTS (NOTE: Wednesday, June 14, 2000, 10:30 - 12:20, Room 152) – Processing electronic payments. Characteristics and properties of electronic payment systems. E-cash, credit-card transactions, SSL, SET, dematerialized checks, EBPP (electronic bill presentment and payment).  View SLIDES.

Readings: Treese Ch. 14.  Also Digital Money Online (inter://trader), Token and Notational Money in Electronic Commerce (Camp, Sirbu. Tygar)

Lecture 11 - MASS PERSONALIZATION (June 16, 1999) – Automation of the customer relationship.   Use of data to customize the web experience.  Cookies and their risks. Obtaining and using personal information.  Rule-based filtering, implicit profiling, collaborative filtering.  Homework 3 due.  View SLIDES.

Readings: Mass personalization links.  Also What is Personalization? (CNET), Cookies (cookiecentral.com)

Lecture 12 - SEARCH ENGINES (June 19, 2000) – Document indexing, spiders and crawlers, query specification, importance metrics, scoring, page ranking, link popularity.  Robot exclusion, index intrusions.  Search engine performance.  Metasearching.  View SLIDES.

Readings: Search engine links.   Also: Search Engine Features for Webmasters (searchenginewatch.com), How Search Engines Rank Documents (van Eylen)

Lecture 7 - DATABASES (NOTE: Tuesday, June 20, 2000, 8:30 - 10:20 Room 152) – Relational databases, object-oriented databases, query languages: SQL. Normalization. Indexed sequential access method (ISAM).  View SLIDES. 

Readings: Treese Ch. 16.

June 21, 2000.  Homework 4 due.

Lecture 13 - DATA MINING (June 23, 2000) – Data mining objectives and techniques. Classification, clustering, link analysis, predictive modeling, text analysis, visualization systems. Data mining applications.   View SLIDES.

Readings: Data mining links.

Lecture 14 - INTELLIGENT AGENTS (June 26, 2000) – Introduction to bots, agents, brokers and avatars.  RAgent architectures, rule-based inference, fuzzy logic.  Mobile agents, multi-agent systems.  Agent programming systems.  Homework 4 returned.  View SLIDES.

Readings: Nwana, Software Agents: An Overview, Is it an Agent or just a Program? A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents (Franklin & Graesser).  Also sample the Ecommerce Bot page.

The final exam is on June 29, 2000.  The exam is open book and notes.  You may use laptops to write the exam.  BUT: ABSOLUTELY NO INTERNET OR LAN CONNECTION IS ALLOWED DURING THE EXAM.  When the exam ends, you may either (1) hand the answers in as a .doc file on a floppy disk; or (2) connect to the net and email the answers to sbhatia@andrew.cmu.edu AND shamos@cs.cmu.edu; or (3) submit the answers in written form on paper.