COM 1721: Freshman Honors Seminar

A Random Walk Through Computing

Fall 2002

113 Cullinane Hall                                                                      Work: 617-373-2075
College of Computer Science                                                 Email: rraj@ccs.neu.edu
Northeastern University                                                           Home: 617-232-8298
Boston, MA 02115                                                                      Fax:    617-373-5121

Class meeting times/location: 149 CN, T 5:20-6:25

Office Hours: Wednesday 12-1

Course Description

Textbook

Grading

Calendar (Includes lecture slides and readings)

Handouts in pdf (and postscript)

(For reading pdf files, you need Adobe Acrobat, and for reading postscript files, you need ghostview)

Course information (postscript) Homework 1 (postscript)
Homework 2 (in postscript)

Course Description

The goal of this year-long course is to give the best first year students an opportunity to explore a variety of topics in computer science. This academic year, we will consider a potpourri of important concepts in computing including abstraction, modularity, presentation, randomization, recursion, refinement, representation, and self-reference. Selected topics that we will cover during this random walk include self-reproducing programs, privacy in communication, relational databases, basic processor design, multimedia data representations (MPEG), structural properties of the World Wide Web, program verification, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and quantum computing.

Textbook

There is no required textbook for this course. Handouts and web links will be provided as reading assignments.

Grading

In this quarter, we will have 4 or 5 in-class quizzes (10 minutes) and reading and written homework assignments. There will be no exams or projects this
quarter. The grade for this quarter will be based on quizzes (total 50%), homeworks and class participation (50%).