CSCI 597 Seminar in Computer Science Research

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

Spring 2004: 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 (Last updated 05/12/04)

Spring 2004	Topic	Speaker	Status	Quiz key
1/12	Introduction, ethics	Itti	OK	quiz key
1/19	MLK Birthday - NO CLASS	N/A	OK	N/A
1/26	Brain operating principles in computer science. slides	Arbib	OK	TBA
2/2	Robotics slides,	Schaal	OK	quiz key
2/9	How to write and revise a winning paper	Itti	OK	quiz key
2/16	President's day - NO CLASS	N/A	OK	N/A
2/23	Sensor Nets slides	Govindan	OK	quiz key
3/1	Bistro slides	Golubchik	OK	quiz key
3/8	Organic computing slides	von der Malsburg	OK	TBA
3/15	Spring recess - NO CLASS	N/A	OK	TBA
3/22	Research challenges in natural language processing slides	Marcu	OK	TBA
3/29	Robotic Sensor Networks paper	Sukhatme	OK	TBA
4/5	A Robust Hybrid Tracking System For Outdoor Augmented Reality paper	Neumann	OK	TBA
4/12	Power Management slides	Ozden	OK	TBA
4/19	The Representation of Planning Strategies paper 1 paper 2	Gordon	OK	TBA
4/26	Wrapup and overview	Itti	OK	TBA

Link to CS597 Fall 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.

• NOTE: 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.