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This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning CSC196.
See also the references given in previous versions of the course.
Please send any comments or questions to the instructor or the teaching
assistant.
CSC196 is one of the First Year Foundations Seminars in the Faculty of Arts and Science. CSC196 is a modified version of previous courses listed as SCI199 during the 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2002-2003, 2003-2004, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years. Note that these SCI 199 were taught as full year (two term) courses. Given that our CSC196 course is a one term course, we will have to be the less ambitious in our choice of topics.
We will pursue the general theme of GREAT IDEAS in COMPUTING (including some surprising algorithms). The ambitious goal is to try to identify some of the great ideas that have significantly influenced the field and made computing so pervasive. We will concentrate on mathematical, algorithmic and software ideas with the understanding that the importance and usefulness of these ideas depends upon (and often parallels) the remarkable ideas and progress in computing and communications hardware. As we will see, many great ideas were initially against the ``prevailing opinion''. In 2008 the Computing Community Consortium was asking the computing research community to help identify "game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years." See the game-changing blog post . It will be interesting to update this blog to reflect the last 12 years since 2008. For example, we plan to discuss the success (and possible limitations) and concerns (e.g., meaningful employment) regarding deep learning and large language models. See, for example, Bill Gates warning . More alarming, there was a Septmber 7 podcast about an AI cyber attack (see AI-cyber-attack . Another recent topic of interest is social networks and the way information (and mis-information) is spread on social networks. Information spread has become a major topic of discussion especially as it significantly impacts political opinions. See, for example, Starbird et al paper on strategic information spread. We may also discuss bias and fairness in machine learning algorithms. See, for example, NY Times article on facial recognition. . Also see Axios article on the impact of AI wth regard to hate speech and a text file below with some links to articles concerning social media and the issue of hate speech, bias and divisive spread of information.
This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning CSC196. Some announcements may also be made on this page. See also piazza (once it is initialized) and Quercus.
Assignments are expected to be handed in on time, as specified in the due date of the assignemnt. We will state clearly (and Markus enforced) precise rules about the penalties for late submissions. The penalty for a late assignment is 5% for each 24 hours up to 48 hours. No further extensions are allowed without a valid documented reason (e.g., sickness with a doctors letter). IMPORTANT: You can submit multiple times. I suggest you submit a version in advance of the due date to be sure you can upload onto Markus successfully.