CSCI 597 Seminar in Computer Science Research

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

Fall 2003: Professor Laurent Itti, itti@pollux.usc.edu

                TA: Nitin Dhavale, dhavale@usc.edu

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.)

See your grades here

Schedule for Fall 2003:

Fall 2003	Topic	Speaker	Status
08/25	Introduction and Ethical Issues	Itti	OK
09/01	Labor Day - No class
09/08	Intelligent agents: here and here	Tambe	OK
09/15	Visual Sensing of Human Activity here, here and here	Cohen	OK
09/22	Characterizing and Defending Against DDoS Attacks reference, and other reference and slides.	Papadopoulos	OK
09/29	Case study slides and link (click on small PDF icon in front of authors to download paper in PDF format)	Itti	OK
10/06	Distributed Robotics here, here (slides will not be made public)	Mataric	OK
10/13	Midterm recess - quiz only but no talk so that you can work on your upcoming midterms or relax after your completed midterms. Enjoy!	?	OK
10/20	Software Engineering slides	Medvidovic	OK
10/27	How to get a Ph.D. slides	Arbib	OK
11/03	Computer Graphics slides	Desbrun	OK
11/10	High-end scientific computing and visualization slides	Nakano	OK
11/17	Planning in High-Stake Decision Situations slides	Koenig	OK
11/24	Multimedia databases slides	Shahabi	OK
12/01	Wrap-up and overview	Itti	OK

Link to CS597 Spring 2003

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.

• During each lecture, speakers will point the students to a link to a representative reference (or set of references) that will assist students in gaining more understanding of the topic discussed in class.

• NEW THIS SEMESTER: During the first five minutes of each lecture, students will answer a five-question quiz that will test their understanding of the previous lecture. Each question will typically be answered in one to two sentences on a sheet of paper provided at the beginning of class. Each quiz will be graded on a 0-5 scale, 0 being the worst and 5 the best possible score. Quizzes not turned in at the end of the initial five-minute period will be assigned a grade of zero. To pass the class, a student will need to accumulate a total score of at least 3n, where n is the number of quizzes given in class during the semester. While quizzes will be designed to be easy and avoid trick questions, on-time attendance to the lectures will be necessary to obtain good grades. To ensure fairness towards all students, no question will be allowed during the quizzes.

• 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.

• Plagiarism Warning: Any student caught cheating during any of the quizzes will fail the class and be referred to the University's student conduct office.