• David Easley, 434 Uris Hall, dae3@cornell.edu
• Joe Halpern, 414 Gates Hall. halpern@cs.cornell.edu

News and Announcements

• Cornell combat robotics is recruiting; applications are due 10/20. See http://www.cucombatrobotics.com/ for details.
• TEDxCornell is recruiting; they host speakers on Cornell's campus to share "Ideas Worth Spreading". See http://www.tedxcornell.com/.
• Delta Sigma Pi, a co-ed business fraternity, is recruiting. See https://www.dspcornell.com/ for details.
• CIS is having a partner-finding social on Sept. 9 in Gates G01:
  • 7 - 8:30: 1000-2000 level courses
  • 8:30 = 10: 3000+ level courses
• You can also find study partners through the Learning Strategies Center: http://lsc.cornell.edu/studying-together/
• Big Red Hacks (Cornell's largest hackathon) will be held Sept. 24-26, in-person for Cornell students, online for others
  • register at https://bit.ly/3ydoWZ3
• the Cornell Mars Rover project team is looking for new members; see https://marsrover.engineering.cornell.edu/.
• Aug. 16: Cornell Mental Health Resources Guide (posted at the request of student organizations).

Materials

• We will be using the book Networks, Crowds, and Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which Professor Easley co-wrote with Jon Kleinberg while teaching this course over the past several years. A complete draft is on-line at the Web page for the book, and the hardcopy version is for sale at the Campus Store.
• Over the past several years, we've offered an on-line version of the course through the edX platform. The materials from this course are now archived, and you can access them by registering on-line at the edX site. Although you can no longer take the edX course as a student, by registering you get access to the videos and on-line exercises. In the course this fall, this edX material will serve as a set of optional resources that you may find helpful for alternate presentations as well as a source of additional practice exercises.

Course Outline

Grading

• Grades on the homework, blog posts, midterm, and final will be weighted as follows:
  • Homework: 40% [9 probem sets; lowest one dropped]
  • Homework must be typed and submitted as PDFs using the gradescope site, by the start of class on the days they are due. (Gradescope can also be accessed from the course Canvas site.)
  • You should sign up on the gradescope site for CS 2850 (even if you are taking it with a different course number). The site will ask you for an entry code; it is X3N6BN. If you have any difficulties, let us know right away.
  • Midterm: 20% (on October 4, in class)
  • Final Exam: 30% (date TBD)
  • Blog Posts: 10%
  • We will be maintaining a class weblog as part of the course, and posting to the blog will be part of the graded coursework, as described in the accompanying handout.
  • Information about the mechanics of posting can be found in the opening blog post.
  • iClicker participation: 0% (score will be considered for borderline cases)
  • We'll use clickers in lecture. You must use a clicker from the iClicker system.
  • Academic integrity guidelines require that you may only use your own registered clicker during class.
  • The process for registering an iClicker is described in the registration instructions.

Class Discussion on Ed

We will be using Ed as a discussion forum for the class. You can access it through the course Canvas site (you should see a link on the left side of the course home page, at the bottom).

Academic Integrity

You are expected to maintain the utmost level of academic integrity in the course. Any violation of the code of academic integrity will be penalized severely.

You are allowed to collaborate on the homework to the extent of formulating ideas as a group. However, you must write up the solutions to each problem set completely on your own, and understand what you are writing. You must also list the names of everyone that you discussed the problem set with. Collaboration is not allowed on the other parts of the coursework.

Finally, plagiarism deserves special mention here. Including text from other sources in written assignments without quoting it and providing a proper citation constitutes plagiarism, and it is a serious form of academic misconduct. This includes cases in which no full sentence has been copied from the original source, but large amounts of text have been closely paraphrased without proper attribution. To get a better sense for what is allowed, it is highly recommended that you consult the guidelines maintained by Cornell on this topic. It is also worth noting that search engines have made plagiarism much easier to detect. This is a very serious issue; instances of plagiarism will very likely result in failing the course.