Course Expectations

• Students are expected to actively participate in class discussions; participation is mandatory.
• Students should be comfortable reading research papers; you will read, answer questions, and comment on the readings before class.
• Students should be comfortable coding data processing systems; familiarity with database query execution, some machine learning, and algorithms is expected.
• Students should be comfortable conducting a research project and writing up the results in a research paper format.

Participation

Participation is mandatory. The topics in the course are speculative and forward looking, so the real content comes from class discussion.

Slack

• Heavy use of Slack, Google Drive features.
• Discussion about the next class will be in the #class-DATE slack channel.
• You are expected to ask and answer questions on slack.

Project (semester long)

You will pursue a semester long research project related to this course. The project is a significant part of the course grade.

Collaboration/Copying Policy

Refer to Columbia’s academic honesty policy if you are at all unsure.

You must write all the code you hand in for the programming assignments, except for code that we give you as part of the assignment. You are not allowed to look at anyone else’s solution, you are not allowed to look at solutions from previous years, and you are not allowed to look at solutions from other universities. You may discuss the assignments with other students, but you may not look at or use each other’s code. The same rule holds for the question assignments: you must write all answers yourself, not look at others’ answers, but you can discuss the questions with others at a high level. You are also not allowed to look for or at solutions to the assignments on the Internet. You can search for small pieces of code that solve small parts of your assignments, and you may use tutorials to learn, however if you copy any code from anywhere, we request that you identify the origin in a comment in the code.

Your reviews must be written originally, and be based on your own understanding and thoughts about the reading. Copying or paraphrasing content written by others is not allowed.

Be advised that we will be running all assignments through the MOSS code similarity tool, which is very accurate even after significant amount of obfuscation, so we will identify and report anyone who attempts to breach this rule. We will include in our tests solutions from previous years both from Columbia and elsewhere. Both copy-ers and copy-ees will be punished. You are responsible for protecting your code and homeworks from others and not leaving them lying around in publicly open directories.

Finally, you may discuss the questions for each assignment with other students, but you may not look at other students’ answers. You must write your answers yourself.