A sample of conferences with lists of papers you could select for the course:

Note that WPI subscribes to the ACM DIGITAL LIBRARIES and thus has the online versions of most journals and conferences of IEEE and ACM.

Plus, a very good on-line server for database-related literature is http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/index.html

Above is just showing you a small glimpse of what is out there. So go and dig in, and select papers on topics that really excite you.