COMP 485: Senior Seminar, Fall 2015

Administrivia

Instructor: Phillip Kirlin
Office hours: MW 12-1, Tue 2-3:15, Thu 10:30-12:15, or by appointment, in Ohlendorf 420.
Syllabus

Finding computer science research papers
- Try these for searching on a specific topic: Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, CiteSeer, ACM Digital Library, CS Bibliography Database, ACM Publications, IEEE Publications
- Find a conference or journal that seems interesting: Find their webpage and look at their articles.
LaTeX: For Windows, I suggest MikTeX. For Macs, I recommend MacTeX. You can also use ShareLaTeX online. Some LaTeX tutorials: 1, 2, 3.

Date	Topic	Notes	Assignments Out	Slides
9/1	Introduction; is computer science science?	Read in class: P. Denning. Is computer science science? Communications of the ACM, April 2005. [link]		(no slides)
9/8	Doing computer science as science			slides
9/15	Picking research topics	Read before class: C. Loehle. A guide to increasing creativity in research - inspiration or perspiration? Bioscience 40:123-129, 1990. [link]		slides
9/22	How to read a research paper	Read in class: D. Watts and S. Strogatz. Collective dynamics of 'small world' networks. Nature, 393:440-442, 1998. [link] [handout]		slides
9/29	Presentation of research papers
10/6	Hypotheses, falsifiability, causality			slides
10/13	Project proposal discussions
10/20	(Fall break)
10/27	(Prof out of town)
11/3	LaTeX
11/10 and 11/12	Project pitches and voting
11/17	First project group meetings
11/24	(No class)
12/1	Statistical hypothesis testing			slides
12/8	Group project proposal presentations