News (Posted October 8)!
Wednesday, October 14, our guest will be Professor Eyal de Lara who will be discussing ``virtualization''. See Quercus announcement for zoom link.
General Announcements
I will be announcing my regular office hours once the term begins and I know more about my schedule. However, I always welcome questions and we will probably also be using piazza as an additional means
of communication. If you want to schedule an individual meeting,
it is best to email me for an appointment and I am sure
we can find mutually suitable times to "meet" where meet will unfortunately only be online for the time being.
This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning CSC196. We will also be using Quercus for posting documents.
See also the references given in the previous versions of the course.
Please send any comments or questions to the instructor or the teaching
assistant.
Previous Offerings
CSC196 is one of the First Year Foundations Seminars in the Faculty of Arts and Science. CSC196 is a new 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.
About First Year Foundation Seminars
Google "first year seminar faculty arts and science toronto" as to the nature and objectives of First Year Foundations Seminars. You probably alreacdy read this and perhaps that is why you chose to take a first year seminar course. But it is worth reading again.
CSC196 Course Overview
We will pursue the general (and very debatable) 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 of the 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 limitations) of deep learning. Another recent topic of interest is social networks and the way information (and mis-information) is spread on social networks. Infiormation spread has become a major topic of discussion especially as it now impacts political opinions. See, for example,
Starbird et al paper on strategic information spread.
This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning CSC196.
Some announcements may also be made on this page. See also piazza (oncde the term begins) and Quewrcus.
Please send any comments or questions to
the instructor Allan Borodin (bor ..funnyatsign ..cs.toronto.edu) or the
teaching assistant (TBA).
Assignments and Quizzes
Assignments will be posted here and (with the exception of A0) will be submitted on Markus. The two quizzes will be conducted on Markus.
Assignments are expected to
be handed in on time, at the beginning of the lecture/tutorial in which
they are
due. Penalty for a late assignments is 5% for each 24 hours up to 96 hours. No further extensions are allowed without a valid documented reason (e.g., sickness with a doctors letter).
Assignment 0
A simple introductory assignment
Assignment 1
Posted September 21
Assignment 2
Reposted October 20 with improved wording and with clarification of question 1. .
Quiz 1
The quiz took place October 19.
Assignment 3
A3 is now complete. Reposted November 5 with a small rewaording in question 2, second part
Assignment 4
Start of A4. Reposted December 1. Note change of due date
Lecture-Meetings
Slides for our meeting will be posted here. I will try to post a preliminary version of the slides before the lecture and then a "final" version following the lecture.
Week 1
Motivating the course, von Neumann architecture, floating point representation (finalized 14/9/20)
Week 2
Wikipedia, dictionaries, data structures for dictionaries. (Repossted 23/9/20)
Week 3
Guest presentation by Henry Yuan on quantum computing. Turing machines and undecideabile problems (Reposted 2/10/20)
Week 4
Turing machines and undecideabile problems. (Reposted 9/10/20)
Week 5
Guest class by Eyal de Lara on the topic of visualization. Start discussion of search engines (Posted 14/10/20)
Week 6
Continue discussion of search engines (Reposted 24/10/20)
Week 7
On Wednesday, we will start Week 7 with a guest discussion on machine learning (ML) by Professor Roger Grosse. On Friday, we begin by giving examples of different networks and basic network/graph concepts as part of our discussion of social networks. (Reposted 15/11/20) correcting a typo on slide 28 where the matrix is B(G)
Week 8
Continue discussion of graph concepts and social networks (Reposted 6/11/20)
Week 9
Guest presentation by Professor Aleksander Nikolov on differential privacy. On Friday, we begin discussion of complexity theory and the P vs NP question. (Posted 15/11/20)
Week 10
We continue the discussion of complexity theory and the P vs NP question.
We will then begin a discussion of complexity based cryptography. (Reposted 27/11/20)
Week 11
Finish the discussion of complexity based cryptography. (Posted 5/12/20)
Week 12
Very briefly discss porgamming languages, compilers, operating systems and paging. (Posted 9/12/20)
Some Previous Tutorial Notes from 2003
New Readings and Slides
Henry Yuan's slides for the September 30 discussion on quantum computing.
Some Readings from the Previous SCI199 offerings
We will begin the course by discussing the
basic