Tentative Course Schedule

Mailing List Announcement
Class communications will be done via the official mailing list (from registration) and will be used for important announcements. It is VERY important that you verify you are included in this list.

Course Objectives
The purpose of this course is to introduces first year graduate students to research in general and research being conducted in Pitt's CS Department. All first year Ph.D. students are required to take this course. Masters Students are welcome, since the course is open to all Computer Science graduate students, but it does not count towards the MS degree.  Students will be given overview and use the basic concepts of reading, reviewing, and writing papers, creating and delivering presentations as well as creating good statistically significants experiments, analysis and plots.

Grading

Attendance

Class attendance is mandatory. Homeworks, assignments, and important dates will be posted on the class web page, but this is provided as a courtesy and is not always complete. It is your responsibility to find out if something important was assigned in class.

Office hours are optional. They are your chance to ask the professor questions about the material being covered, the programming assignments, the PhD life, etc.

Academic Honesty: Collaboration vs. Cheating

This really should not be an issue, specially for PhD students, but to make things as clear as possible the following is necessary.

You are encouraged to discuss the course material and concepts with other students in the class. However, all work that you submit must be your own. Unless, the assignments are explicitly a group assignment, under no circumstances may you look at anyone else's code or show anyone else your code. And while you may discuss the concepts used in the programming assignments, you may not discuss implementation details of the assignments themselves.

If you are caught copying or otherwise turning in work that is not solely your own, you will fail the course.

The bottom line is that you are expected to conduct yourself as a person of integrity, that is, you are expected to adhere to the highest standards of academic integrity. This means that plagiarism¹ in any form is completely unacceptable. As a computing professional, I encourage you to consult the code of ethics appropriate to your discipline².

Plagiarism will be assumed until disproved on work that is essentially the same as that of other students. This includes identically incorrect, off-the-wall, and highly unusual duplicate answers where the probability of a sheer coincidence is extremely unlikely. All colluding parties to this unacceptable collaboration will receive the same treatment.

If you are unsure of what is and is not allowed by this policy, talk to the instructor.

¹ pla-gia-rize vt. to steal and pass of as one's own (the ideas or words of another) to present as one's own an idea or product derived from an existing source - pla-gia-riz-ern. (source: Webster's New World Dictionary).
² The Association for Computing Machinery is http://www.acm.org/, the IEEE is http://www.ieee.org/ and the IEEE Computer Society is http://www.computer.org/.

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