INF 723: Information and Computing

Fall 2015

Lecture/Assignment Schedule

Please see INF723 syllabus for complete policies.

Course Information

Class

Monday 09:20am-11:20am

Classroom

BB 356

Instructor

Amir Masoumzadeh

Office Location

BA-311

Office Hours

By Appointment

Email

amasoumzadeh [at] albany [dot] edu (Always, include "INF723" in the subject of your email.)

Grading

• Readiness Assurance Tests: 8%
• In-Class Activities: 12%
• Individual Assignments: 30%
• Final Paper: 45%
• Class Participation/Team Member Performance: 5%

Due dates

Due dates for assignments are indicated in the "Assignment" column of the schedule below. The followings are applicable to the paper readings that are due for each session (note that there is no extension or makeup):

• Paper Summaries are required for all readings starting 10/12 (except the two readings on how to read)
• Your Paper Summaries are due on Thursday before the readings are due
• Your Reviews of Paper Summaries are due on Sunday before the readings are due

Lecture and Assignment Schedule

The schedule will be regularly updated during the course of the semester.

Week	Topic	Reading	Assignment
8/31	Introductions (Syllabus, Final Paper, ...)
9/7	Classes suspended: Labor Day		Final Paper: Abstract due 9/10
9/14	Classes suspended: Rosh Hashanah
9/21	Information and Information Theory	Chapter 1 - Information from "Information From Processes: Information Creation, Use, and Representation" by Losee Bellinger et al., "Data, information, knowledge, and wisdom" Zins, "Conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge" Machta, "Entropy, information, and computation" Schneider, "Information Theory Primer"	Final Paper: Proposal due 9/25 RAT 1 on 9/21
9/28 and 10/5	Algorithms and Data Structures	Lecture Notes on Computation and Algorithms (Available on Blackboard\Readings) Gordon, Introduction to Pseudocode (slides) Dalbey, "Pseudocode Standard" Further readings on Algorithms/Daat Structures. Check out at least one of the first three. You may choose either one depending on your background. Booksite for "Algorithms, 4th Edition" by Sedgewick and Wayne. It's a condensed version of a good introductory book on algorithms. Chapters 1-4 are relevant. Khan Academy's Algorithms Tutorial LearnAlgorithms Tutorial NIST's "Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures". It's a good reference to look up concepts and terminology	Homework 1 due 9/30 RAT 2 on 9/28
10/12	No Class (Amir@CCS)	S. Keshav, "How to read a paper," ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., vol. 37, no. 3, p. 83, Jul. 2007. P. W. L. Fong, "Reading a computer science research paper," ACM SIGCSE Bull., vol. 41, no. 2, p. 138, Jun. 2009. Paper01: Peter Eckersley, "How Unique Is Your Web Browser?," in Proc. 10th International Symposium, PETS 2010, 2010, vol. 6205, pp. 1-18. (Alternative version of the paper)	Paper01 summary due 10/10 Paper01 summary reviews due 10/13 Homework 2 due 10/16
10/19	Computation Theory	O. Goldreich, "Invitation to complexity theory," XRDS Crossroads, ACM Mag. Students, vol. 18, no. 3, p. 18, Mar. 2012. Secion on Intractability (6.6) from "Algorithms, 4th Edition" by Sedgewick and Wayne. L. Fortnow, "The status of the P versus NP problem," Commun. ACM, vol. 52, no. 9, p. 78, Sep. 2009.	RAT 3 on 10/19
10/26		Paper02: D. A. Reed and J. Dongarra, "Exascale computing and big data," Commun. ACM, vol. 58, no. 7, pp. 56-68, Jun. 2015. [Manuel] Paper03: D. Bacon and W. van Dam, "Recent progress in quantum algorithms," Commun. ACM, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 84-93, Feb. 2010. [Mehrdad] Paper04: C. H. Bennett and G. Brassard, "Quantum cryptography: Public key distribution and coin tossing," Theor. Comput. Sci., vol. 560, pp. 7-11, Dec. 2014. [William] Paper05: M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, and T. Graepel, "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 110, no. 15, pp. 5802-5805, Apr. [Babak] 2013.	Final Paper: Progress Report 1 due 10/30
11/2		Paper06: D. Shahaf, E. Horvitz, and R. Mankoff, "Inside Jokes: Identifying Humorous Cartoon Captions," in Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - KDD '15, 2015, pp. 1065-1074. [Kevin] Paper07: D. Coetzee, A. Fox, M. A. Hearst, and B. Hartmann, "Chatrooms in MOOCs," in Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference - L@S '14, 2014, pp. 127-136. [Felippe] Paper08: M. Bostock, V. Ogievetsky, and J. Heer, "D3: Data-Driven Documents.," IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2301-9, Dec. 2011. [Amy] Paper09: Y. Liu, K. P. Gummadi, B. Krishnamurthy, and A. Mislove, "Analyzing facebook privacy settings: user expectations vs. reality," in Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference - IMC '11, 2011, p. 61. [Mahdi]	Homework 3 due 11/05
11/9	Simulation Science Guest Lecture by Prof. Eliot Rich	A link to the Dropbox folder containing readings/instructions for this session has been posted in the BlackBoard/Readings folder.
11/16	Information Physics Guest Lecture by Prof. Kevin Knuth	Knuth K.H. 2002. What is a question? In: C. Williams (ed.), "Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering, Moscow ID 2002, AIP Conference Proceedings 659, American Institute of Physics, Melville NY, pp. 227-242. arXiv:physics/0403089 [physics.data-an] Knuth K.H. In Press. The deeper roles of mathematics in physical laws. In: Trick or Truth: the Mysterious Connection between Physics and Mathematics, Springer Frontiers Collection, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg. Knuth K.H. 2006. Valuations on lattices and their application to information theory. (Invited paper), Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (IEEE WCCI 2006), Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 2006. Knuth K.H., Center J.L., Jr. 2010. Autonomous science platforms and question-asking machines, IEEE Xplore, Cognitive Information Processing 2010 (CIP 2010), Island of Elba, Italy, June 2010, 221 - 226. (Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/CIP.2010.5604217 )
11/23		Paper10: J. M. Kleinberg, R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. S. Tomkins, "The Web as a Graph: Measurements, Models, and Methods," in 5th Annual International Conference, COCOON'99 Tokyo, Japan, July 26-28, 1999 Proceedings, 1999, vol. 1627, pp. 1-17. [Mohammed] Paper11: D. Liben-Nowell and J. Kleinberg, "The link-prediction problem for social networks," J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., vol. 58, no. 7, pp. 1019-1031, May 2007. [Nim] Paper12: K. Thomas, E. Bursztein, C. Grier, G. Ho, N. Jagpal, A. Kapravelos, D. Mccoy, A. Nappa, V. Paxson, P. Pearce, N. Provos, and M. A. Rajab, "Ad Injection at Scale: Assessing Deceptive Advertisement Modifications," in Proc. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), 2015, pp. 151-167. [Patrick] Paper13: A. Hassan Awadallah, R. W. White, P. Pantel, S. T. Dumais, and Y.-M. Wang, "Supporting Complex Search Tasks," in Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management - CIKM '14, 2014, pp. 829-838. [Yenisel]	Final Paper: Progress Report 2 due 11/24
11/30		Paper14: L. Kari and G. Rozenberg, "The many facets of natural computing," Commun. ACM, vol. 51, no. 10, p. 72, Oct. 2008. [Kahyun] Paper15: A. J. Quinn and B. B. Bederson, "Human computation," in Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '11, 2011, p. 1403. [Monica] Paper16: L. Barrington, D. Turnbull, and G. Lanckriet, "Game-powered machine learning," Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., vol. 109, no. 17, pp. 6411-6, Apr. 2012. [Martha] Paper17: S. Asthana, P. Singh, and P. Gupta, "Survival Analysis: Objective assessment of Wait Time in HCI," in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15, 2015, pp. 367-376. [Wen]	Final Paper: Poster @Mini-Showcase (optional) due 12/1
12/7	Final Paper: Presentation
12/14	Final Paper: Presentation		Final Paper due 12/14