Resources for COMP492
Class 1: January 22
Discussion of syllabus. Course highlights.
Cloud computing lab (see the assignments web page).
Class 2: January 29
Project work day.
Class 3: February 5
Design pattern lab (see the assignments web page).
Class 4: February 12
- Nick's discussion on open-source software. Required reading is:
- Qi's discussion on privacy. Required readings for this
discussion are posted
on Qi's senior seminar
web page.
Class 5: February 19
- Danfei's discussion on Ethics of Military
Robots. Required readings for this discussion are posted
on Danfei's
senior seminar web page.
- Lally's discussion on computer reliability. Required readings for this discussion are posted
on Lally's
senior seminar web page.
Class 6: February 26
No class.
Class 7: March 5
- Chris Pianko's discussion on antitrust cases in the
technology industry. Required readings for this discussion are
posted
on Chris's
senior seminar web page.
- Blake's discussion on quantum computing. Required readings are:
Class 8: March 19
- Christopher Melusky's discussion on cloud computing. Required readings for this discussion are
posted
on Chris's
senior seminar web page.
- Instructor's discussion: trust and computer systems. The
required reading is the classic paper by Ken Thompson,
entitled Reflections on trusting trust. This paper was
actually the lecture given by Ken Thompson when he accepted the
Turing Award. It was also published in the Communications of the
ACM, August 1984, Volume 27, number 8, pages 761--763. A copy of
this copyrighted article is available on Moodle. A full copy of the
program presented by Thompson in Figure 1 of the paper is also
available: thompson-program.c.
Class 9: March 26
Project work day.
At the start of class, please take
the midsemester
survey.
Class 10: April 2
This class will be divided into two separate discussions. The
first discussion is on electronic and online voting; the second
discussion is on automation, globalization, and the digital
divide.
Required reading: Quinn, sections 6.5, 9.1, 9.2, 9.4, and 9.5.
Class 11: April 9
Project work day.
Class 12: Monday, April 15
Present posters at Dickinson Science Symposium, 4:30pm. Note this
takes place on a Monday. There is no class in our regular Tuesday
timeslot this week.
Class 13: April 23
In this class, we discuss two classic papers, both of which are available on Moodle. The papers are:
- Dijkstra, Edsger W., [Letter to the editor] Go to statement
considered harmful. Communications of the ACM, Volume 11, Issue 3,
March 1968, pages 147-148.
- R. Karp, Reducibility among combinatorial problems, in R. Miller and
J. Thatcher (eds), Complexity of Computer Computations, Plenum
Press, 1972, pp85-104.
You are required to read all of the Dijkstra, but only sections 1 and
4 of the Karp (and within section 4, don't read the whole proof of the
main theorem: instead, pick just one of the 21 20 reductions in the
proof, and be prepared to explain that one reduction to the rest of
the class).
Class 14: April 30
Project work day and exit interviews.
Wednesday, May 8
Computer Science Senior Symposium, 2:00pm.