Adam Wierman, 258 Jorg
Office Hours: TBA. You are required to visit me during office hours at least once during the first 3 weeks of the course.
The web is an essential part of our lives and we all depend on it every day, but do you really know what makes it work? This course studies the "big" ideas behind the web. Things like, how do search engines work? How can search engines make so much money from putting adds next to its search results? Are there ways to prevent spammers from accumulating lots of email addresses? What does the web actually look like? How big is the web? For all these questions and more, the course will provide a mixture of both mathematical models and real-world hands-on labs.
This course can be combined with CS/EE 143 and CS/EE 145 to satisfy project requirement for CS undergraduate degree.
There is no required textbook. I will pass out course notes and supplementary handouts at the end of each class.
This is a preliminary breakdown that may change during the term.
Since this is the first year of the course, I'm making all the lectures from scratch, As a result, you'll likely be stuck with my handwritten notes...I'll try to keep them legible! Because of that, I recommend taking notes yourself during class because I will occasionally say important things that won't be reflected in the notes.
Homeworks will be assigned every 1-2 weeks. Many of the problems will be challenging, so please start early. The assignments will represent a mixture of theory (proofs) and applications (coding). The hope is that you will develop and understanding of the theory that will help in the applications. I assume that you can code and use Matlab/Mathematica.
You will receive one homework every week or so. These will typically require a significant amount of work, and you should start immediately and come to office hours to discuss questions. Please do not search the web looking for help on the homework problems. It is difficult to develop good homework problems, and thus you may come across similar problems if you search the web for help.
You are strongly encouraged to collaborate with your classmates on these problems, but each person must write up the final solutions individually. You should note on your homework specifically which problems were a collaborative effort and with whom.
I hope that you are taking this as part of the networking project sequence (CS/EE 143, 144, 145). If you find that you enjoy the sequence, there are a number of other courses that you may also find interesting: