CSCI 390 Spring 2005 Senior Seminar

The senior seminar course will consist of two components: the seminar component and the project component.

Semester Schedule

January 12	Organizational meeting
January 19	What is research? (Reading and questions)
January 26	Student presentation of project proposals (approx. 5 minutes each): Michelle Stephen Matt John Jimmy Chris Ryan Anup
February 2	Chris Two articles and discussion questions (of varying seriousness).
February 9	Michelle Two articles and discussion questions
February 16	John Two articles and discussion questions
February 23	Anup Description of Partial Differential equations Description of Laplace's Equation Laplace Equation Applied to Robotics Questions: Anyone remember partial differential equations? What is Numerical Approximation? Why bother with it? Do you think Laplace's equation is cool? Why or why not? Can you see the application(s) of modeling Laplace's Equation? Why do we want to remove local minima? Do you happen to know of any other ways of modeling this equation than the one I presented (in the literature) so far?
March 2	Midterm Reports (approx 5 minutes each): Ryan John Jimmy Michelle Chris Matt Anup Stephen
March 9	Stephen Articles pattern recognition and MIR intro to virtual music. it's not really that long, just read the paragraphs and ignore all of the musical selections) (from this book:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=C8840F25-963E7ED23AF&ttype=2&tid=10203 ) Questions: What do you think would be the best(or most desirable to use) method for Music Information Retrieval? Do you think any applications for MIR are reasonable/legitimately useful? How would you feel about listening to music that was composed by a computer? What effect (if any) does music composed using Experiments in Music Intelligence or earlier examples of virtual music have on the integrity of music? Where is the line crossed from genuinely composed music to artificially composed music? Is there even such thing as genuinely composed music (given that essentially all music fits into some sort of previously established style)?
March 16	Ryan
March 23	Spring Break, no class
March 30	Jimmy articles For "The Byzantine Generals Problem," please peruse up until page 390 (signed messages). For the "Space Shuttle" article, please skim the whole piece and read the section "Redundant Set Operation" (891-896). Finally, please read this article Questions: What is the point of the Byzantine agreement; what problems does it solve? Could a computer in a real distributed system be a traitor (or actively communicate wrong information)? How? Why are redundant input data sets important (especially for distributed computers in the space shuttle)? Why is the voting actuator, discussed in the space shuttle article, preferred over a master-slave implementation as well as independent computers and sensors? Why is NASA still using technology from the 1970s and 1980s? (This is a legitimate question.) Why would Byzantine agreement be unsatisfactory as a solution for the NASA space shuttle’s computer system? Can you think of any other methods for fault prevention, detection and tolerance in a distributed computer system? Do you have any ideas about where else I could go with my project? Do you have suggestions on how to improve my explanations of concepts?
April 6	Matt article 1. the posts linked to here article 3 Questions If you are MikeyG, Liz or Gary please read and respond to 10 first. If yes: talk more. If no: talk less. Do you think a server is a reasonable item to find in a house? Could the font size be any smaller on the server article? Come on! Intel and Microsoft? What do you think the guy's laptop in post 53 was soaked in? Is having your data stored in a reliable way important, even to normal people? Do you have an interesting data loss story? Do you like TV? Why? Do you have a Tivo? If so, does it bother you that Tivo keeps track of what you watch and sells it? If not, pretend you do have one and answer the same question. Would the fact that Tivo sells user data make you look at alternatives when purchasing a pvr? Would it be terrible if we didn't have much to talk about and got out early?
April 13	Giving a talk discussion One set of advice for designing the talk Some presentation-style tips Discussion Questions :-) What's the point of a talk? For that matter, how many points should you have in a talk? Who is the primary audience for your talk? (And how can we make sure they'll be there?) If good news and bad news always come in threes, is a two-term limit on a president simply a political cop-out? Animations, special effects, cool transitions -- do they help or hurt the talk? How can you go about laying out the talk? Any good techniques?
April 18 (MONDAY)	Final Presentations I (Lindner 101): 4:30: Michelle 5:00: Ryan
April 20	Exit Questionaires
April 25 (MONDAY)	Final Presentations II (Lindner 101): 4:30: Chris 5:00: John
April 27	Final Presentations III (Lindner 101): 4:30: Matt 5:00: Anup
April 29 (FRIDAY)	Final Presentations IV (Lindner 101): 4:30: Stephen 5:00: Jimmy
May 1 (SUNDAY)	Final Dinner, 6:30 pm, location TBA

Seminar Component:

Each week the seminar will meet on Wednesdays from 4:30-5:30 in Alter 207 to discuss a current article or paper. Students will take turns being responsible for leading the seminar discussion. Each student will lead one seminar session.

All date selection will take place at the first seminar meeting. Each person will choose their own article or paper to present and will distribute their faculty guide-approved article or paper on the Wednesday preceding its discussion. Along with the article or paper, each person will also distribute/post 3-5 questions to help the other seminar participants focus their reading. The article or paper should be related to the student's research project.

ALL students are responsible for reading each week's assigned article/paper, and for coming prepared to discuss it at the seminar. Attendance is mandatory and PARTICIPATION COUNTS! Every two unexcused absences will result in a letter grade drop.

Project Component:

Each student will undertake a significant self-directed project under the guidance of Gary, Liz, or Mike. (Other project mentors must be approved by the course instructor.)

Projects must contain or embody the self-directed learning of an academically rigorous CS topic that is new to the student. When deciding what is an appropriate topic one should bear in mind that CS is the study of algorithms and not the study of technology. Projects typically involve either:

• Faculty-sponsored undergraduate research.
• Self-study of a CS topic not offered/available through the Xavier CS curriculum. Examples of this include continued (or graduate-level) study of a topic already studied (e.g. concurrency), or first exposure to a topic not yet seen (e.g. parallel algorithms, graphics, distributed computing).

An implementation exercise is neither a necessary nor is it a sufficient condition for defining a satisfactory senior project.

Examples of worthwhile projects are:

• Theory oriented project: Working with a "Computing Surveys" (or other scholarly journal) article on a topic of interest; one possibly tied into a seminar presentation topic. After mastering the article, and the appropriate background material, one could work out the proofs "left as an exercise to the reader," offer alternative proofs to some of those in the paper, or extend the work by applying the principles in a new way. Projects based on this approach have the advantage in that they are sufficiently rigorous, highly focused (i.e. easily tractable within the constraints of a single semester), and very interesting.
• Implementation-oriented project: Extension of the OS, Parallel Computing, Compilers, or Advanced Algorithms projects. An implementation project typically involves the learning of new material, whose mastery is reflected in the implementation. Implementation projects need to be well thought out so that they are tractable within the constraints of a single semester. Frequently students select implementation-based projects that contain sufficient academic rigor, but are overly ambitious to be completed in one semester.
• Hybrid or other: These projects do not involve a major implementation exercise, nor the proving of lots of theorems. An example could be the studying of database design and optimization techniques. Theoretical material would be studied, the mastery of which would be reflected in an optimized design for a real (or imaginary) database application.

Students must submit a short project proposal and projected completion time line signed by their faculty guide/mentor no later than Monday, January 24, 2004. (If you miss this deadline, then you fail the course.)

In addition to the weekly seminar, students are expected to meet regularly with their faculty guide. Students are expected to keep a project log and to complete satisfactory progress on a regular basis. Furthermore, each student will briefly (2 minutes or so) discuss at the seminar session their progress on their project.

Finally, at the end of the semester, each student will make a public presentation (approx. 20-30 minutes) of their senior project and submit a writeup of their work. What constitutes an appropriate writeup is to be negotiated between the student and their faculty guide.

Grading:

Your grade for the course will be based on your participation in the seminar discussions, the quality of your preparations for the seminar discussion you will lead, the quality of your weekly mentor interactions, the final public presentation, and your work on your project.

Rubric for Senior Project grading

The CS faculty as a whole will be assigning the final grades.

The faculty have very high expectations for success from all of the seniors. Nevertheless a grade of "A" will be reserved only for those whose work/performance is deemed exceptional in all areas of the course. A "B" grade will represent good work, while a "C" grade will be assigned to those whose work is judged to be satisfactory. Any student whose work/performance is judged to be less than satisfactory will receive the failing grade, "F".