Fall Quarter, 2010

Intermediate Data Structures and Algorithms

Overview

Basic information

Lectures

Homework

Projects

Quizzes

Labs

General course features and policies

• Material covered: Lectures don't cover all required material, which also appears in the text and reference books and may be covered only in the lab sessions.
• Academic dishonesty: Cheating will be strongly punished (typically with an F in the course). You can report cheating anonymously at: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/cheating/. Assignment submissions must represent your original work. Copying from any sources (web, other books, past or current students, etc.) is strictly prohibited - learning to program requires you to learn to solve programming problems by yourself; using existing code and other resources becomes important later on in your studies. While discussing assignments together is encouraged, team coding (even of pseudo-code) or letting others see your code are specifically not allowed. Be aware that programs are automatically compared to the current and prior quarter's programs for plagiarism, using a sophisticated code-comparison tool that ignores insignificant differences (like whitespace and variable names). Be aware that a subset of exams may be photocopied, for comparison with exams submitted for regrades. Also, be aware that lying to an instructor in order to be able to makeup a missed exam or in other ways to obtain a better grade can be treated as academic dishonesty.
• Regrade policy: Regrade requests must be submitted in writing and within two weeks of the distribution of the graded material. The entire homework/test/assignment may be regraded, not just the problem in question, so the grade may go up or down. Thus, think your regrade requests through carefully. To have a homework/test regraded, communicate with the TA(s) who graded the involved questions. For assignments, send email requests to the CS141 grader account (cs141-g) with detailed explanations. Recording errors should also be pointed out to TAs or the instructor before the last class.
• Final grades: Per university policy, changes to your final grade will be made only in the event of a clerical error. Asking your instructor how far you were from a cutoff and what extra work you can do to improve the grade is not appropriate.
• Communicating with the instructors and TAs: When sending electronic mail to the instructors or TAs or graders, please include your full name, student ID number, and UCR email address, so that we may properly identify you (remember, many students have similar names). Also, please try to be polite and use reasonable grammar and formatting.
• Cell phones: During lectures and lab sessions, please turn off your cell phone. During exams, cell phones must not be visible (e.g., store them inside a backpack).
• Written Assignments: All assignments and solutions will be posted on the class homepage. Write your full name with upper-case LAST name, assignment number, student ID, login, class section, lab section. Write legibly: what cannot be read will not be graded. Consider typing the assignment if you handwriting is hard to read. Written assignments have to be submitted before the beginning of the class on the due date on the instructor's desk. Include the following on first page ``I certify that this submission represent my own original work'' (date, signature). No late assignment will be accepted. Any problem with grading of a written assignment should be addressed at the latest two weeks after the assignment is returned to you.
• Programming assignments: All programming assignments will be turned in electronically. Each file should begin with our report template header. Source code should comply with professionally accepted coding standards. In particular, all code must be compiled with the -Wall -W -Werror command line options, or else it will not be graded. Also, you must include a section explaining the design, structure, etc of your program and how it works. Comments in source code are important, but they are not a replacement for an explanatory section. Please remember that successfully writing a computer program that compiles and runs correctly is not something anyone can do in just a few minutes, even when it looks easy. Debugging typically takes three times longer than figuring out how to write your program. So don't leave your programming assignments to the last minute!
• Reading: Read the current book sections before coming to lecture, and attend all lectures in their entirety. Feel free to ask questions.

Lab guidelines

• Students are expected to attend the lab sessions in their entirety. The lab sessions typically consist of tutorials, discussions, reviews, practical exercises/tests, and time for students to work on homes and programming assignments.
• During lab tutorial/discussion/review time, students should not use the computers. Ideally, students would move their chairs to the whiteboard area.
• To reduce disruptions and provide for the best educational environment, all persons in lab during scheduled lab time should be formally registered in that section. In general, no swapping sections and no unregistered people in the lab are allowed, even if there are extra computers.

Grade mapping

Tutorials

• STL guide
• Tao's tutorial on Recurrence Relations
• David's tutorial on Graphs, graph representation, and traversal
• David's tutorial on Minimum Spanning Trees
• David's tutorial on Shortest Path
• Theoretical Computer Science Cheat Sheet [PDF format]