CMSC 31100-1: Big Ideas in Computer Science

Organizer: Lance Fortnow

Lectures: MWF 10:30-11:20 in Ryerson 276

Teaching Assistant: Xiofei He

Course Requirements: Students are required to attend all classes. Each week the faculty member of that week will assign readings and a short assignment. Grades and course credit will be based on these assignments. There will be no exams. Grading will be Pass/Fail.

Course Schedule

1. Week of September 27: Janos Simon on Models of Computation and Undecidability.
   • On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem by Alan Turing.
   • Assignment 1, Due Friday October 8.
2. Week of October 4: David MacQueen on Structural Operational Semantics.
   • A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics by Gordon Plotkin, 1981 Monograph. (2.1 MB, 133 pages)
   • Assignment 2, Due Friday October 15. See also typos (updated 10/14).
3. Week of October 11: Stuart Kurtz on Randomness.
   • Kolmogorov Complexity by Lance Fortnow. Note: This survey contains some of the solutions to the homework problems. Try doing the homework before reading the proofs in the survey.
   • Assignment 3, Due Monday, October 25.
4. Week of October 18: Lance Fortnow on Cryptography.
   • RSA Labs Cryptography FAQ
   • Zero-Knowledge Tutorial by Oded Goldreich
   • Assignment 4, Due Friday, October 29.
5. Week of October 25: Ian Foster on Packet Switching and the Internet.
   • The Internet is arguably the most complex system ever built by humans. Its several hundred million nodes operate in a decentralized but coupled fashion to process trillions of messages daily with a surprisingly high degree of reliability. The secret to this remarkable success is a small number of design principles, some already present when the first Internet node was brought online in 1969, and others introduced over the past 30 years. In these three lectures, I introduce these principles and explain how they have contributed to the development of the Internet of today.
   • Monday Slides: Powerpoint PDF
   • Introduction to Distributed Communications Network by Paul Baran.
   • A digital communication network for computers giving rapid response at remote terminals by Davies et. al.
   • The Evolution of Packet Switching by Lawrence Roberts.
   • End-to-End Arguments in System Design by Saltzer, Reed and Clark.
   • Wednesday Slides: Powerpoint PDF
   • Data and Computer Communications by William Stallings
   • Routing Information Protocol
   • Friday Slides: Powerpoint PDF
   • Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks by Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert
   • Search in Power-Law Networks by Adamic, Lukose, Huberman and Puniyani
   • Graph Structure in the Web by Broder et. al.
   • Assignment 5, Due Friday, November 5.
6. Week of November 1: Rick Stevens on Software Engineering.
   • Slides
   • Reading Material
   • Assignment 6, Due Friday, November 12.
7. Week of November 8: Gina Levow on Learning, Uncertainty, and Information.
   • Topics: The noisy-channel model, probabilistic reasoning, and learning through the lens of Hidden Markov Models and their EM-based training procedures.
   • Reading Material and Slides
   • Assignment 7, New Due Date: Monday, November 22.
8. Week of November 15: Robert Kirby on Stability.
   • Lecture Notes
   • More Lecture Notes
   • MGNet
   • poly.c
   • jacobi.c
   • Error Analysis of Direct Methods of Matrix Inversion by J. H. Wilkinson.
   • Error Analysis of Floating-Point Computation by J. H. Wilkinson.
   • Very Early Days of Matrix Computations by Beresford Pralett.
   • Assignment 8 due Monday, November 29.
9. Week of November 22: Pedro Felzenswalb on Fast Fourier Transforms and Signal Processing.
   • Lecture Notes
   • Fast Fourier Transform Algorithm in Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest. See Pedro for a copy.
   • Assignment 9, due Friday, December 3.
10. Week of November 29: John Reppy on Techniques for Program Specialization.
    • An Introduction to Partial Evaluation by Neil D. Jones.
    • Assignment 10 due Friday, December 10. Please put the homework in Xiofei He's mailbox in Ry 160B or if you don't have access to that room in Lance Fortnow's mailbox in Ry 152.

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