Announcements

• Professor Kleinberg's office hours on Tuesday, May 13, will be held in Upson 315.
• Here is some information about the final exam.
• Solutions for problem sets 9 and 10 have been posted on CMS.
• To accompany the lecture given on Wednesday, April 30, here are some notes on online prediction algorithms.
• From Monday, 4/28 to Friday, 5/2, we will use a modified office hour schedule to provide extra help before Problem Set 10 is due. Here is the schedule.

  Day	Time	TA	Location
  Monday, 4/28	11 a.m. - 12 noon	Andrew Chan	328 Upson
  Monday, 4/28	12:15 - 1:15 p.m.	Kareem Amin	328 Upson
  Monday, 4/28	1:15-2:15 p.m.	Nikos Karampatziakis	328 Upson
  Monday, 4/28	3-4 p.m.	Kan Li	328 Upson
  Tuesday, 4/29	11-12 a.m.	Bobby Kleinberg	4138 Upson
  Tuesday, 4/29	12-1 p.m.	Rafael Frongillo	328 Upson
  Tuesday, 4/29	1-2 p.m.	Hyungoo Kang	328 Upson
  Tuesday, 4/29	2-3 p.m.	Bobby Kleinberg	4138 Upson
  Tuesday, 4/29	3-4 p.m.	George Panayotov	328 Upson
  Wednesday, 4/30	2-3 p.m.	Bobby Miller	328 Upson
  Thursday, 5/1	11:30 a.m. - 12 noon	Bobby Kleinberg	4138 Upson
  Thursday, 5/1	1-2 p.m.	Chris Estela	328 Upson

• Solutions for Prelim 2 are now on CMS.
• Problem Set 10 is due on Wednesday, April 30.
• To accompany the lecture given on Friday, April 25, here are some notes on the Miller-Rabin randomized primality test.
• Problem Set 9 is due on Friday, April 25.
• If you received a score for Problem Set 5, Question 2, but the score doesn't appear in CMS, bring your paper to someone on the course staff so they can re-enter your grade into CMS.

Staff and Office Hours

• Add cornell.edu to any incomplete email addresses below.

CS 482 STAFF	Name	Email	Phone	Office	Hours
Instructor	Bobby Kleinberg	rdk2	255-9200	4138 Upson	Tues. 11-12
					Thurs. 10-11
TAs	Kareem Amin	kaa32		328 Upson	Mon. 12:15-1:15
	Andrew Chan	ahc35		328 Upson	Wed. 11-12
	Chris Estela	cde8		328 Upson	Thurs. 1-2
	Rafael Frongillo	rmf25		328 Upson	Tues. 12-1
	Hyungoo Kang	hk297		328 Upson	Weds. 12-1
	Nikos Karampatziakis	nk238		328 Upson	Wed. 1-2
	Kan Li	kl342		328 Upson	Thurs. 3-4
	Bobby Miller	rkm23		328 Upson	Wed. 2-3
	George Panayotov	gvp3		328 Upson	Thurs. 12-1
Course Administrator	Stacey Shirk	sbs27	255-0980	4105 Upson

Mailing lists

• Broadcast message from the course staff to students will be sent using cs482-l@lists.cs.cornell.edu. All students should subscribe.
• There will be an additional mailing list, cs482-staff-l@lists.cs.cornell.edu, for the staff only. Students should use this for addressing questions to the course staff about homework clarifications and procedural questions (e.g. scheduling a make-up prelim). Do not use this list as a substitute for office hours. Questions about the lectures, homeworks, etc., should be asked in office hours.

Homework

• There will be weekly problem sets, due in class (usually) on Friday.
• Late Homework Policy: It is expected that homework will be turned in in class and on time. Late homework will not be be accepted except in emergency situations.  If a genuine emergency situation exists you must inform the course staff as soon as possible.
• Submitting Homework: To simplify the process of distributing papers for grading, each homework will consist of 3 problems.  Each problem must be turned in separately.  In other words, each of problems 1, 2, 3 will be placed in separate piles when homework is handed in on Friday.
• Returning Homework: Homework will be returned at the end of class (usually) on Friday. Any homework not picked up in class can be picked up from Upson 360, 10:00-12:00 and 2:00-4:00 Monday through Friday.  You will need your Cornell ID and you will not be able to pick up an assignment for another student.
• Homework Privacy: Normally, graded homework is handed back in a self-service stack.  In other words, your homework grade is not private. If you prefer more privacy, clearly mark HOLD at the top of the first page of each piece of your homework; these papers will be held for pick-up in Upson 360.
• Warning: It is unlikely that you will learn the material in the course unless you do the homework. Those who skip a significant number of them are likely to earn poor grades on the exams (as well as receiving a low homework grade).

Grading

• Your course grade will be based on homework (due each Friday), two prelims, and a final exam. Weighting will be roughly as follows:
  • 40% homework
  • 30% prelims (15% each)
  • 30% final exam
• Grading Criteria: For the most part, you will be asked to design algorithms for various problems. (There will not be any programming assignments.) A complete answer consists of a clear description of an algorithm (an English description is fine), followed by an analysis of its running time and a proof that it works correctly. You should try to make your algorithms as efficient as possible.
• CMS: We are using the CS course management system at http://cms.csuglab.cornell.edu/ to manage course grades. Please check your grades regularly to make sure we are recording things properly. The system also provides some grading statistics.
• Regrade Policy: Regrade requests must be made within one week of the time that homework or exams are returned to the class.  It's not fair to the graders to ask them to explain details of their grading scheme for an assignment from several weeks ago.  Also, this rule prevents a pileup of such requests at the end of the semester.
• Regrade Process: If you believe your solution to a question was correct and it was marked incorrect then you should write up an explanation of the grading error, attach it to your homework, and bring it to the TA who graded the question. Alternately, you can leave the homework and written explanation with the instructor. Note that we're talking here about correct algorithms that were treated as incorrect; in general, we will not look at regrade requests that are simply arguing about the amount of partial credit assigned. Regrade requests will be handled periodically in batch mode rather than on-the-spot.

Academic Integrity

• Any violation of academic integrity will be severely penalized. You are allowed to collaborate on the homework to the extent of formulating ideas as a group. However, you are expected to write up (and understand) the homework on your own.
• Cornell's Code of Academic Integrity: http://www.cuinfo.cornell.edu/Academic/AIC.html

Basic Course Data

• Time and Place: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 9:05 to 9:55 in Olin 255

• Course Description (from the Catalog): Techniques used in the creation and analysis of algorithms. Combinatorial algorithms, computational complexity, NP-completeness, and intractable problems.

Prerequisites

• We will assume that everyone has seen the material in CS 211, 312, and 280, and we will use it as necessary in 482. This includes elementary data structures, sorting, and basic terminology involving graphs (including the concepts of depth-first search and breadth-first search). Some of these are reviewed in the text.
• The lectures and homework involve the analysis of algorithms at a fairly mathematical level. We expect everyone to be comfortable reading and writing proofs at the level of CS 280.

Text

• Algorithm Design by Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos.  This text is available at the Campus Store.
• Note that, although this book was designed for this course, there will be topics covered in lecture that are not in the text and there will be topics in the text that are not covered in lecture.  You are responsible for topics covered in lecture and for any assigned reading in the text.
• The following are also useful references.
  • T. Cormen, C. Leiserson, R. Rivest. Introduction to Algorithms. 
  • A. Aho, J. Hopcroft, J. Ullman. The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. 
  • M. Garey and D. Johnson. Computers and Intractability . 
  • D. Kozen. The Design and Analysis of Algorithms.

Schedule

• The Schedule lists topics covered in lecture and the corresponding chapters in the text. It includes some prediction of future lectures. This will be updated periodically during the semester.

Items Placed on the Web

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