CSCI 597 Seminar in Computer Science Research

Mondays, 12:00-12:50, OHE-122

Fall 2002: Professor Laurent Itti, itti@pollux.usc.edu

                TA: Sheng Shi, shengs@pollux.usc.edu

Link to CS597 Spring 2003

You can pick up your HWs from outside SAL211 after Monday, 16th.

All HW grades are now online here, grades.

CSCI 597 provides a series of expository lectures to introduce Ph.D. students to the breadth of research topics in CS (and, to some extent, beyond). The idea is to cycle through the subareas of USC research in CS each semester.

First-year Ph.D. Students are required to enroll for 1 unit of CSCI 597 for the first 2 semesters of the Ph.D. Program. (Applicable only to students enrolling in Summer of 2000 or later.)

Schedule for Fall 2002:

Spring 2002	Topic	Speaker	Status
August 26	Introduction and Ethical Issues in Research	Itti	OK
September 2	Labor Day - No class
September 9	Perceptual Grouping in Computer Vision	Medioni	OK
September 16	Imitation Learning: Computational Modeling and Robotics	Billard	OK
September 23	Self-Reconfigurable Systems: The Challenges and the Future	Shen	OK
September 30	Simultaneous Optimization	Goel	OK
October 7	Motion Tracking and Event Understanding in Video Sequences	Cohen	OK
October 14	Processing Geometry: Graphics as a Mathematical Discipline	Desbrun	OK
October 21	Large-Scale Embedded Networks	Govindan	OK
October 28	Natural Language Processing	Hovy	OK
November 4	Distributed Denial of Service Attacks	Papadopoulos	OK
November 11	Teamwork	Tambe	OK
November 18	Nanorobotics	Requicha	OK
November 25	Peer-to-Peer Computing	Horowitz	OK
December 2	Wrap-up and advice on getting a PhD	Itti	OK

Guidelines:
Each talk will be a Tutorial on the given sub area, but may also serve to frame some specific interest of the presenter. In addition, some lectures will present other topics of general interest to Ph.D. students.

Before the class professors will (in almost all cases) place on the Web (a) a good expository article on the topic of the talk; (b) a set of 3 questions about the talk and/or paper each of which can be answered in at most a page.

Students will be required to submit the answer to ONE question in the form of hard copy handed in at the following lecture. The deadline for submission of hardcopies is strict and is the end of the lecture following that to which the essay pertains. Late and email submissions will not be accepted. All essays will be collected by the TA at the end of each lecture, and will be placed into an enveloped that will be sealed and immediately delivered to the corresponding professor for grading. The lecturer on that topic will submit a simple grade for each page of 0 (not submitted or trivial), 1(passable but based on moderate effort), or 2 (a very good effort). [Please save a copy of your homeworks in your personal accounts, so that you can refer them for future use.]

One professor will act as supervisor for a whole year of the course.

It will be the job of this professor to ensure that a lecturer is signed up for each class meeting, that materials are posted on the Web, that papers are submitted and graded, and that a final grade (CR/NCR) is assigned.

Advice to students on homework: 
The questions are designed to ensure that you pay attention to each topic, yet do so in a way that will not take more than an hour or so beyond the lecture (unless the topic was of special interest to you). I thus suggest the following strategy: Print out the 3 questions and bring them to the lecture, then take notes during the lecture in relation to the 3 questions. By the end of the lecture, you should each be clear about which question you will answer and have some good notes toward that answer. An hour with the assigned article should then be enough to flesh out the notes into a full page response. Each essay must be submitted at the following class in the seminar series.

Plagiarism Warning:
You are encouraged to use material from the literature in writing your essays, but you MUST follow normal scholarly practice in doing so.
a) If you want to use material as it appears in the original, you place it in quotes or display it in a distinctive font. If you leave something out of the quote, you mark the gap with three dots: ,,, If you change a few words, you enclose [the new words you write] in square brackets. You follow the quote with the source and page number -- e.g., Smith and Wesson, 2000, pp. 37-38 -- and you place the full bibliographic reference in the Reference list at the end of your paper.

b) Alternatively, if you summarize or paraphrase the material, you need not put it in quotes, but you must still acknowledge the source, as in: As Smith and Wesson (2000) have shown, xyz. Departures from these norms will not be tolerated.