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CS 314 and CS 414, or equivalent courses. Students are expected to understand fundamental issues in operating systems, file systems, and networks and to be comfortable programming in the C programming language.
Multimedia is a new and rapidly developing field. A comprehensive text that is appropriate to this course is not available. The required readings for this class will consist of selected journal and conference articles, as well as notes we will produce. All required readings will be made available in class. You are expected to read the material before coming to class -- you will get significantly more out of the lectures if you do so.
We will hand out course notes and copies of the relevant papers. Whenever possible, we will place these on-line, but many of the papers are not available on line and can only be copied. Since the copying costs go well beyond the amount allocated for the course, you will be ask to pay $30 towards the copying costs. Please give a check (no cash) to the Cindy Robinson (Upson 4146) payable to "Cornell University." In the "memo" section of the check, write the course number (CS631).
You are not required to buy the optional books. Partridge is an excellent text on next generation networks, Jain is a great text on Digital Image Processing.
There will be a newsgroup for this course (cornell.class.cs631) and a WWW home page (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Courses/Current/CS631). The slides used in lecture will be available electronically, as will any handouts that we write and several of the papers for the course.
All enrolled students will be given accounts in the Upson CS Undergraduate Lab (room 315). You are welcome to use other machines for doing assignments.
CS631 is a graduate course, and will be graded like one. We expect to give out mostly A's, but this depends on your doing the assigned work. There is no final exam or mid-term in this course.
Your grade is determined by three measures. First, you will be graded on your answers to three homework assignments that will require programming and/or written responses. Second, you will complete a small scale research project. The homework assignments will constitute 25% of your grade, the project will count for 75% of your grade. Third, you will required to read 75% of the papers passed out. For each paper you read, you must post a critique of the paper on the Web (see below). You must get a passing grade on 75% of the critiques to pass this course. The critiques otherwise have no effect on your grade.
You should work in groups of two or three on all assignments. When working in a group, hand in a single response for the group that includes the names of all students in the group. The same grade will be given to each student. We expect all students in a group to be equally able to answer questions about the program or project.
Written problem sets should be turned in electronically before the beginning of the lecture on the due date. Instructions for handing in assignments will be given with the assignment. Late assignments will be rejected. Assignments will be returned electronically.
Grades will be posted (indexed by a secret ID number you provide) on the web. If you believe that we have made a grading error, please bring the matter to our attention, but no later than one week after your assignment has been returned. To submit a problem set for regrading, send a short note explaining clearly why you think it should be regraded to one of the TAs.
We expect students in CS631 to uphold Cornell's standards of academic integrity. If we find out otherwise, you will fail the course. The work you submit in CS 631 is expected to be the result of your individual effort. You are free to discuss course material, approaches to problems, and details of the system with your colleagues and instructors, but you should never misrepresent someone else's work as your own. Permissible cooperation should never involve a student possessing a copy of all or part of another student's program or other work --- regardless of whether that copy is on paper or in a computer file on a hard disk or a floppy disk.
The only exception to the above rules is when students work together to submit a joint project.
It is also the student's responsibility to protect his/her work from unauthorized access. For example, do not discard copies of your programs in public places. If someone turns in your work, you may be held partly responsible.
You must do three things to complete this course: assignments, critiques, and the project. Each assignment will tell you what you have to hand in. Critiques and projects are described below.
For 75% of the papers you receive, you must publish a critique of the paper on the web. The critique should be available from your CS 631 web page (which you will create in homework assignment one). The purpose of this critique is to get you to think critically about what you read (welcome to graduate school, Virginia). For each paper, your critique should answer the following questions in one to two paragraphs:
We will examine these critiques to determine if you have read and understood the paper..
The final project is a small scale research project. It must have two qualities: it must attack a research problem, and it must pertain to multimedia. So what is "research"? Research proposes and evaluates a new solution to an interesting problem. This simple statement has two parts:
You will work in groups of two to four students on the final project. If you want to work individually or in a larger group, you must ask Brian before Sept 23rd. We will provide a list of possible projects a few weeks into the course, or you may explore an idea of your own, subject to our approval.
You will be required to write a project report approximately ten pages in length and to make a 15 minute oral presentation. Your grade will be based equally on the quality of your research, the quality of your writing, and the quality of your presentation. Sign up sheets for the presentation will be available later. The best projects will be selected to present in class during the last week of classes.
Three milestones, at the 5, 6, and 9 week marks, will help to measure your progress. The first milestone (Sept 23rd) will be a brief written presentation (one to two paragraphs) of your two proposed projects (a primary and a backup). Such papers are called "white papers" in normal research projects. The second milestone (Sept 30th) will be a short (approximately 2 page) written project proposal. The third milestone (Oct 21st - Oct 25th) will be a 5 minute presentation on the status of your project. The final presentation will take place on Nov 25th and 26th.