CSC 200: Undergraduate Problem Seminar

Ganesh: A deity for researchers.

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Information

Summary

This course is intended to provide students with a hands-on feel for what research is like. The experience will tend to be CS- or IT-related, but to a large extent, research is research.

A significant component of the course will revolve around semester-long research projects carried out by small teams in collaboration with a faculty advisor. These projects will develop and exercise the following abilities:

• 1. Researching, understanding, and presenting the state of the art in a specified semi-open problem,
• 2. grounding and solidifing this understanding by implementing a solution that approaches the state of the art, and
• 3. attempting to identify areas where the state of the art might be pushed and pushing on it.

Team members will regularly present project progress the the rest of the class during semi-formal discussion sessions, where team understanding, approaches and progress, will be critiqued, and potentially modified. These discussions will also serve as a venue for coordinating the efforts of different teams. Teams will also prepare weekly written reports

Teams and topics will be established a few weeks into the course. The hope is that most droppers will have dropped by that time, so the teams will be stable.

A second component of the course consists of guest lectures by researchers in the computer science department. The course may also address issues in proposal writing and evaluation.

Attendance is mandatory. Participation in critique sessions is an essential part of the experience, as is attendance at guest lectures. There may be 5-minute "easy" quizzes on material occuring in the previous class as a means of documenting attendance and attention. This could include the content of unscripted discussions.

NOTE THAT CSC 200 IS NO LONGER REQUIRED FOR THE CS BA DEGREE.
Students should not undertake this course lightly. It is expected to be a significant amount of work. Research is that way. It is also likely to be the first course where the professor is not providing material and answers, or detailed instructions. That is also how research is. If you are not interested in this sort of experience, don't take the course. If it's your bag however, it could be a bit of fun in addition to a lot of work, and you will learn a lot (not all of it technical knowledge).

Prerequisites

The course may require non-trivial programming, so 173 is required. Projects may require the use of multiple source files and libraries, so experience with programming utilities such as make, or more sophisticated systems is desireable. Efficiency may be an issue, so ability to program in a relatively efficient language such as C or C++ (though not assembly) is required. Java, Python or Matlab may not always cut it. Some projects may require efforts outside of the programming arena.

Course Text Books

• "Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists" by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere, (Copernicus, an imprint of Springer-Verlag, 1995). The title says it all.
  
  
• "ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years, 1966-1985" (ACM Press, 1987). The best and the brightest in CS, in their own words!!!
  
  
• "The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA" by James D. Watson, W. W Norton & Co., 1981; Also in print from Touchstone Books, 2001. A real classic.
  
  
• "Who Got Einstein's Office?" by Edward Regis, Perseus Publishing, 1988. A history of the Institute for Advanced Study, which was home to fourteen Nobel laureates and most of the century's greatest mathematicians and physicists, including Einstein, Kurt Godel, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
  
  
• "A Gift of Fire" by Sara Baase (Prentice-Hall 1997). Very readable inquiry into some of the ethical societal issues arising from mastery of information technology.
  
  
• "Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices", editied by Charles Dunlop and Rob Kling, (Academic Press, 1991). Older, but still largely relevant set of essays.
  
  
• "Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Carers in Science and Engineering" by Richard M. Reis (IEEE Press 1997). For anyone contemplating a career in academics.
  
  

Grading

Some combination of:
Attendance/quizzes, class participation, presentations, project reports, project accomplishments.
As a first approximation, 20% each. However, note that quizzes, class participation and presentations can only occur in class, and much of the project work and organization will occur in class, hence most of the grade is dependant on attendance. If you do not attend class regularly, you cannot pass this course, and missing more than a session or two will seriously impact your final mark. If you cannot avoid an absence, contact or email me IN ADVANCE.

The contents of the following may be expected to change regularly.

• Assignments
  
  
• Interesting/useful links
  
  
• Local resources
  
  

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