Overview
The course work for this class will consist of a to-be-determined set of homeworks, and (for CS6150 students) a final project. For students in CS 5150, the assignment will count for the entire grade, and for CS6150 students, the assignments will count for 75% of the grade, the remainder being the project. Students in CS5150 may do a project to earn 25% extra credit if they so desire.
Homework
Students will be able to drop the worst homework score. The remaining homeworks will be averaged to obtain the overall score.
Project
Only students registered in CS 6150 are required to do a project. Students registered in CS 5150 may do a project for extra credit.
In groups of two or less, students are required to do a final project for the class. For this project, the group will:
- Find a paper published in the last 15 years in a major algorithms conference (STOC, FOCS, SODA, or SOCG) that has at least 100 citations (as determined by Google Scholar, or you can also surf this (somewhat dated) page)
- Construct a summary of the key ideas in this paper
- Provide a detailed analysis of what made this paper important, the context it came about in, and what came after. Particular importance should be paid to the interplay of ideas used.
- Summarize all of the above in a report of 10 pages or so (full page, 11pt font)
Submission Rules And Templates
All homeworks must be submitted as PDF documents. In decreasing order of preference, you should submit them as
- LaTeX generated PDF
- PDF generated from some other editing program like Microsoft Word
- Handwritten assignments scanned in as PDF
For those of you using LaTeX, there are a number of options:
- The CADE lab has a complete LaTeX installation. You might find this style file useful for assignments, and I will provide the source for all homeworks so that you can merely edit. This is a good guide to using LaTeX, and this is an excellent Q&A site for questions about LaTeX. Also please read the list of things NOT TO DO in LaTeX.
- If Google Docs is more your style, then you might find http://docs.latexlab.org very convenient. It links to your Google Docs folder and provides preview capabilities, as well as the ability to export to PDF.
If you’re a Ph.D student, or if you plan to start doing research on a regular basis, any time spent learning LaTeX is worth your while.
Late Submission Policy
All deadlines will be at 5pm on the specified day, unless I provide a different time. Late assignments will lose 10% of the total credit for each late working day. An assignment that is submitted more than 5 working days past the deadline will be returned ungraded for no score. There are no exceptions.