COM 1722: Freshman Honors Seminar II

A Random Walk Through Computing

Winter 2003

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

COM1721: Freshman Honors Seminar I (Fall 2002)

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

Office Hours: Wednesday 11-12

Course Description

Textbook

Grading

CALENDAR (Includes homeworks, handouts, and readings)

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.

In the Winter quarter, the course will be divided into two parts. The first half of the course, comprising of 5 lectures delivered by the instructor, will cover a selection of topics from computer architecture and operating systems,. The second half of the course, comprising of 5 classes, will be devoted to student seminars.

Student Seminars

The student seminars form the second half of the course. Each seminar will be a brief survey of an interesting application/problem/result from computer science; suggested topics will be given out in the first couple of weeks of the course. The students will work in pairs, with each pair delivering one seminar. Each seminar presentation will be 20 minutes long; the group should also submit a 3-page report on their topic.

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 3 in-class quizzes, 2-3 homework assignments, and the seminar. The grade for this quarter will be based on quizzes (total 25%), homeworks (total 25%) and seminar and class participation (50%).