People:

Instructor: John Clements

Class:

The course has one lecture section. It meets Tuesday and Thursday at 9:10 AM in room 143 of building 20. You must attend every lecture, as many concepts described in lectures may be extensions of the material in the papers covered. Classes will be a mix of lecture and student presentation. After the first week, students will be assigned to present particular papers.

Computing Environment: You are responsible for maintaining your own programming environment, on the machine and platform of your choice. You may complete the programming assignments using any language for which an evaluator is freely available on UNIX.

Assignments: There will be six programming assignments in this class. In general, each one will follow from one of the papers we read. Again, you may complete the programming assignments in the language of your choice.

You are welcome to use different programming languages for different assignments. This course will give you the chance to try out different languages, and to understand their differences by using them.

Along with choice comes responsibility. You will be expected to formulate test cases that demonstrate the correctness of your program. Untested portions of programs are assumed to be incorrect. You may further be required to demonstrate the correctness of your code by giving a short presentation (with advance warning).

Furthermore, each student is expected to present one of the class papers. This presentation should be approximately thirty minutes, and will be graded.

Exams: There will be no exams in this course.

Grades: Grades will be determined by performance on programming projects, the student presentation, and class interaction. A small fraction of the grade is determined by the instructor's whim.

The grading breakdown is as follows: six weekly assignments worth 10% each, a presentation worth 20%, class participation worth 15%, and 5% up to the instructor's whim.