This course is focused on the way information is stored, retrieved, and displayed. Simple bibliographic databases are giving way to unregulated and unorganized multimedia data repositories, which can give the user great difficulty when searching for information. This course shows how to handle full-text, graphics, video and audio, and how to distribute these massive databases over networks. The course will focus on theoretical development of information retrieval system for multimedia contents as well as practical design and implementation issues associated with Internet search engines. Topics include probabilistic retrieval, relevance feedback, indexing of multimedia data, and applications in e-commerce.