CSCI 4448/5448 — Fall 2011

I just finished posting final grades for the class; they should be available on-line soon. The last thing on my to-do list for the class is posting the remaining graduate student presentations. I'm aiming to get that done by tomorrow night.

I hope you enjoyed the class and I hope everyone has a terrific Winter break!

When I updated the Grades page with information on the graduate presentations, I forgot to upload a spreadsheet providing feedback on each presentation. I've now corrected that error (see link in previous sentence). My apologies.

In general, the presentations were of very high quality. I'm still planning on getting them all uploaded to the site, hopefully by the end of this week.

This is a (very) preliminary announcement that, early next year, CSUAC will be hosting their Mobile Apps Challenge again. Those of you working on mobile apps for your semester project may be able to reuse them for the challenge or at least be prepared to create a new app specifically for the challenge. Last year, the winners received cash prizes and had a chance to network with members of the local start-up community. Be on the lookout for the announcement for next year's challenge later this month and come with your best mobile app to compete for the top prize!

We had a number of updates to the Grades page for Homework 4 for a few assignments that were either lost in the mail due to OIT zapping them or due to other delays in grading particular assignments. 

FCQs for in-class students will be administered tomorrow at the end of class. Please be sure to attend to provide feedback. CAETE students, please make sure to fill out your on-line FCQs.

Homework 7 is now available.

Grades for Homework 6 are now available on the Grades page. As usual, a spreadsheet is available to provide early feedback. Homework 7 will appear soon. And, I'm working my way through the graduate student presentations and have a goal of having the scores for that assignment posted by Friday.

I'm traveling tonight to attend a conference for the next couple of days. As a result, I will not be able to send "Submission Received" messages for Homework 6 until early next week. So, don't expect an acknowledgement for Homework 6 over the weekend.

The slides and example code for Lecture 25 are now available.

The slides and example code for Lecture 23 are now available. See you tomorrow!

The grader recently sent a message to a subset of the students in class asking for your help in finalizing the grading of homework 4. In particular, he will need your help clarifying problems with your code, helping him to get your code compiled on his system, getting the input files required by your system, or meeting with you to view your system running on your own machine. Please respond to his message as soon as possible, so we can wrap up the grading of homework 4 and move on to grading homework 5. Thank you.

My office hours will be delayed by 30 minutes this week and will end at 3:20 PM so I can attend this week's colloquium. Therefore, my office hours on Thursday will be from 2:30 PM to 3:20 PM. FYI.

Lecture 20 is now available. Unfortunately, I discovered I wasn't ready to present a lecture on advanced iOS, so I'm skipping ahead to cover the next two chapters in our textbook (chapters 12 and 13). I don't expect you to have read these chapters by tomorrow's lecture. I hope to present advanced iOS topics sometime next week.

Grades for Homework 3 are now available on the Grades page. If you received zero points, you either didn't submit the assignment or we discovered recently that you submitted the assignment but it didn't get to me. The grader will be grading those assignments soon and I'll get the Grades page updated with those scores after that. I'll be posting the graders spreadsheet later today to provide a first round of feedback.

I have finished grading the midterm and the Grades page has been updated with your scores. I will discuss the midterm on Tuesday; if you are on campus, please be sure to come and pick-up your midterm. If you are a remote CAETE student, I will be giving CAETE your exam on Tuesday after the lecture and they will then forward it to you. If you do not pick up your exam on Tuesday, I will place the remainder of the exams up in ECOT 717. You can stop by and pick up your exam after the lecture on Tuesday as long as you bring a photo id. I will send out a reminder about this once the exams are up in ECOT 717. Below find some stats on the exam, which now has a maximum score of 90 points after I dropped page 7 of the exam (see the previous post).

I'm getting e-mail today from some savvy graduate students that indicate they are working on their presentations this weekend to ensure they also have time to work on Homework 5. That's a very good idea!

Homework 5 is now available. It is due on Monday, November 7th, meaning you have essentially two weeks (and three weekends) to work on it. It is a significant assignment, so do not delay. If you are not currently on a team, you need to get on a team immediately!

The slides and sample code for Lecture 18 are now available.

The slides and sample code for Lecture 17 are now available.

I have four graduate students that still need to pick a topic for the graduate student presentation. If you do not have a message from me that says "Topic approved" then you need to contact me and tell me what topic you are covering for your presentation.

Also, if you are not yet a member of a project team, you need to get on a team soon. I would love to see team sizes of 3-4 people. Having said that, I'm happy to accept teams of 2 to 5 people. The semester project will launch on Monday. So, please, if you are not on a team, please form a team this weekend. Use the posterous forum to form teams.

Finally, I'll be grading the midterms this weekend. I hope to have them graded by Thurday. That may change depending on when I receive the midterms from all of my CAETE students. Stay tuned.

If you are a graduate student and you have not yet selected a topic for your presentation, be sure to contact me by the end of this week. By my count, 18 graduate students still need to pick a topic. You can see what topics have already been selected (and which ones are still available) by visiting the Presentation assignment on this website and scrolling to the bottom of that page.

The sample code for Lecture 9, Lecture 11, Lecture 12 & Lecture 13 is now available.

I finally had time to review the grading for Question 4 of Homework 2 and have updated the Grades page in response. In general, if you had points taken off for that question: you had 4 points added back. There were a few students, unfortunately, whose answers were such that I couldn't give any points back. If you were expecting your score to improve and it didn't change, then feel free to contact me and I'll discuss the situation with you.

The slides for Lecture 11 are now available.

I will be talking about the Android framework next week. If you have an interest in exploring the examples I will present next week or if you are thinking about doing a semester project using the Android framework, then you need to get a version of Android installed on one of your computers. I wrote up a post last Spring called Installing Android that covers the basic steps. Note: I make references to "API 9" in that article. That version is now out-of-date. You should instead simply install the latest version of Android that is available.

Grades for Homework 2 are now available on the Grades page. In addition, I am making available a PDF copy of the spreadsheet that the grader created while grading this assignment. It uses the same ids as the Grades page but also shows you the point breakdown for your assignment along with any comments the grader made.

The slides for Lecture 9 are now available.

A student sent me the following link to a recent presentation about C++ by Herb Sutter. This student pushed himself to use Java for Homework 3 but codes in C++ every day at work. Students used a wide array of programming languages for Homework 3 including Java, C++, ruby, python: it's great to see that programming languages are alive and well!

This week, visiting professor Ken Sugawara from Tohoku Gakuin University in Japan is giving a colloquium—during the standard time slot of 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM on Thursdays in ECCR 265—on work related to robotics called Collective Motion of Self-Propelled Elements with Simple Dynamics. Prof. Sugawara is visiting CU this year while on sabbatical and will be working with our robotics professor, Nikolaus Correll.

The grades for Homework 1 have now been posted on the Grades page. As you will see, the Grades page now displays the average score achieved on this assignment split between undergraduates and graduate students. Your id is now listed as a link that you can click to view a customized report of your grades throughout the semester. The "predicted grade" field is essentially meaningless at this point. As we have just one assignment, it is currently showing you what percentage you achieved on Homework 1 and how that percentage maps into a letter grade. The "predicted grade" field won't really mean anything until later in the semester after we have the midterm, more homeworks, and (for graduate students) the presentation grade.

If you have any questions about the grade you received, please contact the grader. I will be sending his name and e-mail address in a message to all of the enrolled students in class. For future assignments, in addition to the scores, I will also be posting the grader's feedback on the class website. We weren't quite ready to do that for this assignment, so you will need to send him e-mail to gain insight into your scores for this assignment. After you have had a chance to talk to the grader, if you still have questions, you can then arrange to meet with me to discuss your assignment and the grade you received.

The sample code for Lecture 7 is now available.

I have moved the information on submission guidelines to the class website at the top of the Assignments page. Future assignments will reference this information rather than the place where it appears in the first lecture of the semester. The only change to the submission guidelines is that they have been updated to specify the name of the file that you will submit when sending me PDF files or ZIP archives. See the Assignments page for details.

In anticipation of posting the scores for Homework 1, I've added a Grades page to this website. Currently, it lists two tables of "ids". The first table is a list of ids corresponding to the undergraduates enrolled in this class. The second table lists the ids of the graduate students (both in-class and CAETE) enrolled in the class.

Note: If you are an undergraduate student enrolled in the class via CAETE, then your id will appear in the graduate student table. Historically, all CAETE students were graduate students and I'm not going to take the time to distinguish between undergraduates and graduate students enrolled via CAETE.

In my next post, I will explain the algorithm for how you should compute your id. You should, for now, use that algorithm to confirm that the id you expected is listed on the Grades page. If it is not, shoot me an e-mail and I'll supply you with additional details.

Homework 3 has been updated with the following clarifications.

1. A customer can have more than one active rental. That is, they can show up on day 1 and rent 1 video for 5 nights. They can then show up on day 2 and rent another video for 4 nights. As long as they do not have more than 3 videos rented, they are allowed to have multiple rentals.

2. Returns occur at the beginning of the day before the store opens for business. A video rented for one night is available to customers the very next day; that's because the customer rented the video for one night, watched it, and got it back to the store early the next morning.

3. Your program should be single-threaded; you do not need to handle the case of multiple customers trying to rent videos concurrently.

If you are an in-class student, you should have received a message from me containing a URL that points you to videos of the class lectures. If you did not receive that message, let me know. Please do not share this URL; it is meant for in-class students only and if this privilege gets abused, it could be taken away from future in-class students. Thanks!

The sample code for Lecture 6 is available. It contains the same example written in three different programming languages: Java, Objective-C, Python. Enjoy!

The slides for Lecture 5 are now available.

Homework 2 is now available.

The slides for Lecture 4 are now available.

I'm slightly changing my office hours from 2 PM to 4 PM on Thursdays to 2 PM to 3:25 PM on Thursdays. The reason? I forgot about the department colloquium which is held on Thursdays from 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM. I may not attend every colloquium. On those days that I don't attend, I'll hold office hours until 4 PM. Otherwise, I'll wrap up office hours at 3:25 PM so I can dash over to ECCR 265 to attend the talk.

The sample code for Lecture 2 is now available.

In addition to the Department's Ice Cream Social that is planned for Thursday, September 1st from 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM in ECCR 265, the CS Undergraduate Advisory Committee is hosting its own welcome back event. Details are below! Please do what you can to attend both events!

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What: CS Welcome Back Fest,
Who: CS students (majors, minors, grad students)
When: Wednesday August 31st, 5:15pm - 7:30pm
Where: DLC Lobby

Description:

+ A welcome back meeting for all CS students
+ Free food + drinks 
+ Prizes: 1 XBOX 360 & 2 Ipod Shuffles!!
+ Highlight: Techstars companies Orbotix and Occipital will be there to present cool stuff and talk about their companies.

RSVP for the event at this URL: http://goo.gl/QVuqR

The slides for Lecture 2 are now available.

Thanks very much for an enjoyable first lecture. The slides for Lecture 1 are now available. See you on Thursday! Please try to read Chapter 1 of the textbook by Thursday's lecture.