George Mason University
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

CS491 - Great Principles of IT - Fall 2002

There will be no class on Mon Nov 25 (Thanksgiving week). (9/30/02)

The design problems, including one for extra credit, are now posted. (9/30/02)

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• Peter Denning discusses the nature and historical forces behind the emerging IT profession.
• PJD's Columns for the Communications of ACM have discussed a variety of issues relevant to IT practice and professional mastery.
• Algorithms and Processes, a short overview of the field of algorithms and the limitations of algorithms.
• Ray Kurzweil projects the future of technology and Moore's Law.
• John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid discuss how technology evolves in its social-historical context.
• Consciousness. John Searle discusses the nature of consciousness and how a scientific investigation of consciousness and artificial brains might be conducted.
• Completing the Loops, an overview of the structure of the linguistic processes by which we coordinate action.
• Original course overview for CS491 (Jan 2001).
• Approved Synthesis course overview for CS491 (Jun 2002).
• Course Description.
• There is no such thing as information, an essay by Steve Talbott wondering whether our belief that information is a quantifiable entity has taken us too far, into a world of interpretations that do not match reality.
• Technology, Alienation, and Freedom, an essay by Steve Talbott about mathemetical time, space, and other abstractions characterizing our age.
• Langdon Winner's article on "aggressive disrespect" and its meanings for professionalism and professional identities.
• Overview of some great IT principles.
• Vint Cerf's Internet Model.
• Reading Practices to help you read faster and more effectively.
• Tutorial on queueing network models.
• Virtual Memory overview, by Peter Denning, from a recent issue of ACM's Computing Surveys.
• Before Virtual Memory by Peter Denning, a personal retrospective on the early development of this technology.
• Recent research paper on virtual machines in distributed systems (1999).
• Technical Report from UTexas on mapping security requirements into hardware (1991).
• Virtual Machines Model for "user processes" in Unix.
• Virtual Machines Terminology.
• Jim Gray's overview of data and his speculations about the future.
• Queueing Networks Tutorial, a summary of the key ideas from queueing network models of throughput and response time in multi-server systems.
• Performance Evaluation and Experimental Computer Science, making the case that performance modeling illustrates experimental computer science at its best.
• Operational Analysis of Queueing Network Models, a new approach to undertanding models of computer system performance.
• Data Security tutorial from Computing Surveys.
• God is the Machine, an essay by Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine.

No Teaching Assistants are assigned to this course.

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I will give you a series of design problems, corresponding to some of the Great Principles we will be covering. These problems will be due at intervals of approximately every two weeks. They will collectively count 60% toward the final grade.

You will be responsible for a course research project. In your project report, you will focus on a principle, showing its inception, its reincarnations, its impact, and its integration into the consensus of important principles. You will have opportunities to present drafts and obtain feedback. You will give a presentation of your project before the class which may also include other faculty members as evaluators. Each team will have opportunities to present drafts and obtain feedback. The project will count 30%, and the final presentation 10%, toward the final grade.

There will be no midterms or final.

You can estimate your overall score, S, at any point by averaging the scores of graded items with the weights given above and normalizing on a scale of 10. There is no curve. Your grade will be:

• A: S is at least 9.0
• B: S is at least 7.8 (and less than 9.0)
• C: S is at least 6.0 (and less than 7.8)
• D: S is at least 4.5 (and less than 6.0)
• F: S is less than 4.5

Class participation is very important.

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The topics listed below will be covered. The time spent on each will depend on the level of difficulty or the level of interest.

What Makes Ideas Great (1 week)

The Algorithmic Method (2 weeks)

What Machines Can and Cannot Do
Programs = Algorithms + Data
Complexity: Measuring Algorithmic Time and Space
Circumventing the Complexity Barrier with Heuristics
Universal Machines
Self reproduction and artificial life
Language and the Problem with Information

Distributed Systems (5 weeks)

The Internet
Naming
Secret and Secure Communication
Access and Authentication
Virtualization
Commanding the Computer: The Human-Computer Interface
Transactions and Data
Concurrent programming
Laws of System Performance

Cooperative Systems (3 weeks)

Information systems
Agent-Based Computing
Speech recognition and understanding
Perception
Machine Learning
Enterprise and E-Commerce

Contemporary Open Questions (2 weeks)

Nomadic computing
Interaction Models
Alternative methods of computing
MIT's Oxygen Architecture
Bionic Body Parts

CS491 is a 3-credit senior integrative course. Students must have standing as seniors (completed 90 credit hours) and have completed at least two CS 400-level courses.

This course aims to develop students' sense of the whole of information technology by synthesizing and integrating their existing knowledge from separate CS specialties. It discusses the great principles on which CS is founded, their relationships with one another, and their relationships with other fields. It examines what makes a principle great -- durable, wide, and lasting impact -- and traces the history of each principle to demonstrate why it is great. It also examines several of the major system problems facing information technologies today, speculating about how the great principles will influence the development of solutions and what new principles might emerge from the development.

Catalog Description: A synthesis course for CS majors. Offers a holistic view of the field and its connections with other fields. Covers great principles of information technology from algorithms and programming, distributed systems, and cooperative systems. Emphasizes the historical development of these principles, why they have stood the tests of time, how they relate to one another, and how they relate to issues in other fields. Also covers major contemporary open questions in information technology. Includes a project with an oral presentation.
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Recommended books:

• Alan Biermann. Great Ideas in Computer Science. MIT Press. 1990.
• John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Harvard Business. 2000.
• James Burke. The Day the Universe Changed. Little Brown. 1995.
• Hubert Dreyfus. On the Internet. Routledge. 2001.
• Richard Feynman. Lectures in Computing. Perseus. 1996.
• David Harel. Computers, Ltd.. Oxford University Press. 2000.
• Robert Hazen and James Trefil. Science Matters. Anchor. 1996.
• Robert Hazen, James Trefil, and Anthony Gaudin. The Sciences: An Integrated Approach. Wiley. 1999.
• Danny Hillis. The Pattern on the Stone. Perseus. 1999.

  I may also select articles for you to read; if that happens, copies will be available for you on this web page as resources.
  
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  GROUPS AND COLLABORATION:
  
  On the first day of classes, you will form into study groups, most of size 3. You should meet with your study group once a week as part of your normal class work (you can do this with an on-line meeting service such as Microsoft NetMeeting or Netscape Communicator, a conference call, or an in-person meeting). You should discuss all homework questions freely and frequently in your group. Except when group projects are explicitly declared, you must write your own individual report for each assignment. You will learn much more working with your group than you would working alone. It is important to acknowledge the sources of your information -- name the persons with whom you collaborated, cite sections from books or articles if you use them, etc. In short, collaborate freely, acknowledge all help and sources, and write your own individual homework reports. Your study group will also function as a project team in the projects that you will work on. At all times, you must observe the University's Honor Code.
  
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  PROJECTS:
  
  There will be a project involving research into one of the great principles. The objective is for you to become an observer of the evolution and impact of principles in the manner of authors such as James Burke. You will need to locate and read old scientific papers and books that show the gestation of principles or important developments with them. You will have opportunities to get feedback and guidance on your drafts and to make a presentation before the whole group.

  For the project, your team will submit a written report of approximately 20 pages.

  It is important for your to work out in advance how you will divide up the work on the project among yourselves so that you can aim for equal distribution of the points. It is important to work out a schedule so that you can get everything done -- don't put the main work off to the last minute because you can be severely hampered by computer overloads that so frequently happen in last-minute rushes. It is also important to keep your promises to your group members because otherwise they will not sign an equal-distribution statement with you at the end. The project due dates will not be postponed except for major emergencies (e.g., snow days or machine unavailability).
  
  If you encounter any breakdowns in the operation of your group, let me know immediately so that I can help you solve the problem.
  
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