Here's what I'm hoping what everyone will get out of this course:

... for Team Leaders

Upon completion of this course, team leaders will:

• Develop an understanding of how MapReduce can be used to tackle a specific research problem in information processing (broadly defined).
• Contribute new knowledge about the specific research problem.
• Gain experience in leading, coordinating, and managing a small research team.

... for Team Members

Upon completion of this course, team members will:

• Understand and be able to explain the concepts behind the MapReduce programming paradigm, specifically, functional abstraction, distributed storage, and scheduling of distributed processes.
• Be able to express well-known algorithms (e.g., PageRank) in the MapReduce framework.
• Gain in-depth experience with one research problem in information processing (broadly defined), specifically:
  • Understand how current solutions to the particular research problem can be cast into the MapReduce framework;
  • Be able to explain what advantages the MapReduce framework provides over existing approaches;
  • Articulate how adopting the MapReduce framework can potentially lead to advances in the state of the art.