CS380 -- Fall 2006

• Grading
  • The grade will be made up of 60% homework and 40% classroom participation.
  • Homeworks will consist of either or both of programming and written components.
  • Classroom participation will consist of 2 parts
    • paper reviews -- each student will present summary and analysis of 2-3 papers. These summaries will be 10-20 minutes in length and should both describe the paper and provide a critical analysis of the work. The paper reviews will occur in the second half of the course.
    • Standard participation -- to aid you in preparing, I will provide each week on the class website a list of about 5 questions on which you will be responsible for knowing the answers. The questions will be posted no later than 11:59 pm Thursday for the following Tuesday's class.
• Schedule
  • Class will meet once a week for about 2 hours. The scheduled time is Tuesday from 6pm to 8pm. I am not adverse to changing this meeting time if it causes issues for many and a mutually acceptable time can be found.
  • I will rarely be on campus except immediately before and immediately after class. However, I am often available for help. Send email to both gtowell@cs.brynmawr.edu and gtowell@avaya.com asking for help. If you think the question is complex, suggest a time and a phone number where I can reach you. I will do my best to respond to your email quickly and call you when you ask. If I am unavailable, I will suggest alternatives.
  • I can also be available for help on IM. I will probably have to reactivate any IM account I use, so I will take a poll and sign up with whatever services is used by the majority of the class.
  • September 12 is weird for me.
• Assignments
  • Assignments my contain either or both of programming and wriitten responses.
  • For the assignments, working is groups of up to 1/2 of the class size is fine. However, I will expect better work out of larger groups. The groups may aso write written portions of assignments that include programming. (You may choose to program in a groups and write individually). The only assignments that require individual work will be those that have no programming (and it is not clear tat this will ever happen).
  • Groups can be flexible. That is, you may change groups after each assignmnet.
  • Almost any programming languages you want to use is fine.
  • Programs must be submitted electronically and be trivially executable by me. In the first homework I describe the method that I will require if you use Java. If you want to use some other language you need to provide equivalent functionality (for instance you might be able to figure out something with tar files and shell scripts.) If your are unsure about this please talk to me.
  • Both and executable and human readable form of the program must be submitted (For some languages, e.g., python, these are the same thing.)
  • Homework must be submitted electronically. To submit electronically, send email to gtowell@cs.brynmawr.edu with attachments as required by the homework.
  • Text associiated with homework my be submitted as plain text files, postscript or PDF. No other formats are acceptable.
  • Assignments are due at the beginning of class. Assignmnents not recieved by the beginning of class will loose 10%. Assignments wiill continue to loose 10% for each week that they are late. (Please do not get behind, I hate late penalties.)
• Get out of Jail free. Each student has one "get of of jail free" card for late homework or classroom participation. Both must be "played" at the beginning of class. The only time you cannot use this for classroom participation is when you are doing a paper presentation.