CMSC 300: Computer Science Research Foundations

Instructors: David Wonnacott, with appearances by Steven Lindell, John Dougherty, Dora Wong, and possibly others.

Semester & Year: Spring 2010

Texts: Probably none; the course will be based on presentations about fundamental research skills by faculty and science-library staff, followed by student presentations later in the term.

Schedule: Friday 1:30-4:00

Prerequisites: This course is open to juniors in good standing who have declared a major in Computer Science; other students may enroll with instructor's permission.

Description: An introduction to the skills required for advanced work in computer science, this course complements the "do everything yourself" approach of introductory work through exploration of existing work on a topic of the student's choice. This course is designed to prepare a student for future research work in computer science, such as a summer internship.

Each student will select a topic and explore existing work, producing a description of the "state of the art", preferably with some analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. The description may be composed primarily of prose (as a senior thesis would be), or it may employ some other medium to clearly communicate the student's understanding of the topic (for example, a collection of clear and concise program fragments that are surrounded by commentary, or some more formal kind of literate programming). At the end of the semester, each student will present their result orally. Topics may be almost anything to do with the study or application of computer science, including (but not limited to):

a comparison of computational techniques for...
- solving some interesting problem in computer science
- investigating some natural phenomenon
- important technology (the internet, electrical grid, voting system etc.)
an investigation of the uses of computing ...
- in education (not necessarily CS education)
- to address issues of social justice
- as a business opportunity (e.g. for a "start-up" company)
- to create new opportunities for social interaction

Students are expected to combine a multitude of resources of different forms, such as textbooks, web sites, traditional publications, other library resources, personal communication, etc. to demonstrate they can find a variety of sources and synthesize an overall understanding of a topic from these sources. The topic should not be something that is covered by another class in the bi-co curriculum, and preferably will not be definitively covered in a single textbook. As noted above, the emphasis will be on figuring out how other people have addressed an issue, not exploring your own cool innovation (those are welcome but not mandatory in a senior thesis).

Students may ask each other for help, but significant help from fellow students must be described and acknowledged by the student being helped.

This course differs from the senior research experience in that it is a single semester and students are not expected to engage a topic at the same level of detail or provide the same precision in things like the statement of the problem being solved, descriptions of algorithms, etc.

Requirements:

Organization and presentation of brief lessons for the class, e.g.
- "look at this cool new research tool I found", or
- "here is what 'Literate Programming' is all about";
Constructive participation in review sessions of classmate's writing;
Final paper and oral presentation.

Page maintained by John Dougherty, David Wonnacott.
Computer Science Department, Haverford College.