Basics

Class meeting time: 4:00-5:00 pm M, Room B213 Main Street Office hours: 1:30-2:30pm M-W This URL My home page

Caveat This page will be changing throughout the semester.

Outline, Prerequisites, and Expectations

This course has a corequisite of CSCE 145, 204, or 206.

This course is intended to provide you with the bigger picture of how computing fits into the modern world and why there is more to "computing" than just "programming." Unlike nearly everything else taught in the department, this will not be a highly technical course. We encourage you to participate in the discussions and ask questions. As the department chair, I am nominally in charge of this course, but as the lecture list indicates, this is a course that is truly team taught by most of the faculty in the department.

Official Syllabus

Here is the official syllabus for this course.

Email

There is a CSE department email alias for CSCE 190, namely CSCE190-001 in the domain lists.cse.sc.edu. This alias sends email to the CSE departmental login userid@cse.sc.edu that you get with this course. A mass mailing to the entire class will be done through these mail aliases. Actually, any of you can send mail to this alias.

The mail alias of the previous paragraph sends mail to the CSE departmental login that you get with this course. You are responsible for reading mail sent to this account. You can set the forwarding to any other account you wish, whether it be an engr.sc.edu, gwm.sc.edu, yahoo.com, or similar account, but you are responsible for reading the mail that gets sent to your cse.sc.edu account.

Texts and References

This course will be taught with multiple materials provided to you during the semester. In addition, there are a number of books and papers that are worth reading about computing, its past, and its future.

• The ACM.
• The ACM student membership page.
• The ACM TechNews page.
• The ACM Career and Job Center page.
• The ACM CareerNews page.
• The IEEE.
• The college page about computing support
• Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 1995.
• Peter Denning, "Computing is a Natural Science," Communications of the ACM, July 2007, pp. 13-18.
• Peter Denning's website, especially the Great Principles of Computing pages
• Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do, 1992.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Computer Contradictionary, 1995.
• The Jargon File.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Devil's DP Dictionary, 1981.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle's website
• Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines, 1990.
• Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999.
• Ed Lazowska's website
• Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 1979.
• Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things, 1988.
• Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, 2000.
• Herb Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1968.
• Guy Steele, The New Hacker's Dictionary, 1996.
• Henry M. Walker, The Limits of Computing, 1994.
• (and for something completely different) Charles Stross, Accelerando

Tests and Assignments

The assignments are detailed here. The last day to drop the class with a "W" grade is 4 October.

Schedule

Note: Except for the first two lectures, the scheduling of lectures into days has not yet been done. Precise dates will be firmed up as the semester progresses.

(Tentative) Schedule by date

27 August 2007:	Introduction. Core curricula in computing: what are the core courses, how do they fit together, what are the "tracks" one can follow in electives (tracks such as computational math/scientific computing, graphics/visualization/multimedia, agents/ecommerce, bioinformatics, etc.) Professor Duncan Buell
3 Sept 2007:	NO CLASS (LABOR DAY HOLIDAY)
10 Sept 2007:	The job market and employment trends. What do job titles mean? What should one expect as a career path? Professor Duncan Buell
17 Sept 2007:	"Connecting dots in a flat world," Juan Vargas, Microsoft Corporation
24 Sept 2007:	Game programming and visual simulations. Professor Jijun Tang
1 Oct 2007:	IT and software in a major company. Chris Pierson, Doug Warner, SCANA
8 Oct 2007:	Trends in software design and development. Professor Mike Huhns
15 Oct 2007:	Bioinformatics and scientific computing. Professor John Rose
22 Oct 2007:	Managing large software projects. Rita Anderson, USC University Technology Services (powerpoint presentation) (glossary of terms) (example)
29 Oct 2007:	Computer security. Professor Csilla Farkas (powerpoint presentation)
5 Nov 2007:	Trends in the infrastructure of computing: processing, storage, bandwidth. Professor Jason Bakos
12 Nov 2007:	Image processing, vision, and speech. Professor Song Wang
19 Nov 2007:	How do the internet, the Web, and Google work? Professor Jose Vidal (powerpoint presentation)
26 Nov 2007:	The math behind Google and search. Professor Amy Langville, College of Charleston
3 Dec 2007:	Trends in the control of physical devices: robots, pervasive/embedded computing. Professor Jason O'Kane

Notes and Slides

(Caveat: any lecture notes preparedin advance may well change during the lecture process, and if you print them too early or too often you may use up your print quota.

Deadlines

Assignments will have due dates. Unless otherwise specified, these will be turned in by the beginning of the class period on the due date. Late assignments will not be accepted without prior arrangement to accommodate truly extraordinary circumstances.

You are responsible for attending class.

No makeup quizzes will be given.

Academic Honesty

Assignments and examination work are expected to be the sole effort of the student submitting the work. Students are expected to follow the University of South Carolina Honor Code and should expect that every instance of a suspected violation will be reported. Students found responsible for violations of the Code will be subject to academic penalities under the Code in addition to whatever disciplinary sanctions are applied.

There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding of the concept of "your own work." In addition to the USC Code, some good sources of text for what is or is not acceptable behavior are the academic honesty policy statement from Harvey Mudd College, the policy statement from Professor Steven Huss-Lederman at Beloit College, and the text of part of the collaboration policy statement from MIT. You can expect your programming assignments to be checked against those turned in by other members of the class as well as code that I can find on the web. I expect the correlations between your work and that of others to be minimal.

I can also offer an operational definition of what you can do and of how you can distinguish "learning from a group discussion" and "turning in someone else's work." If, after having participated in a group activity, you can walk away, put the books down, have lunch, and then come back afterwards to re-create from your own head the material and techniques you discussed as a group, then you can legitimately say that you have learned from the group but the work you turn in is your own.

On the Proper Use of Computing Resources

Students are expected to be aware of the university policy on use of computing resources, including the Student Guidelines for Responsible Computing, as well as the college and departmental policies on proper use of computing resources. Every instance of a suspected violation will be reported. Students should be aware that neither the instructor nor the department are responsible for making alternative arrangements should improper use leading to revocation of access to departmental or college resources make it impossible for you to complete the programming assignments on time.

On the Nature of Academic Work

Students might also find relevant an essay from a professor at Georgia Tech.