CS 440/ECE 448 Homework and Exams

Office Hours

Office hours will be Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 5-7pm, in ECEB 5034, beginning W Jan 25.

Day	Time	Location	Staff
Monday	5-6PM	ECEB 5034	Ningkai
Monday	6-7PM	ECEB 5034	Austin
Wednesday	5-6PM	ECEB 5034	Yijia
Wednesday	6-7PM	ECEB 5034	Rahul
Friday	5-6PM	ECEB 5034	Jialu
Friday	6-7PM	ECEB 5034	Jason

Siebel Office Hours will be on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

Day	Time	Location	Staff
Tuesday	9:30-10:30AM	Siebel 0207	Mark
Tuesday	1:30-2:30PM	Siebel 0207	Dhruv
Thursday	3:30-4:30PM	Siebel 0207	Bryce
Friday	9:30-10:30AM	Siebel 0207	Yiran

Homework

MPs can be done in groups of up to three people. It is okay to form groups across 3 and 4 credit versions and across the two sections (Professor Hasegawa-Johnson and Professor Hockenmaier)

Literature Review

Each student taking this course for 4 credits should read 10-15 papers and submit a review (Due Date: May 7). Papers must be from peer-reviewed conferences or journals, e.g., Transactions (Not Magazines!) of the ACM and IEEE, Journals of ACL and Elsevier, AAAI, ACL, AISTATS, COLING, CVPR, EACL, ECCV, EMNLP, ICASSP, ICCV, ICML, ICPR, IJCAI, Interspeech, JAIR, NAACL, NIPS, UAI; if you want to review a paper from some other conference or journal, ask first. Your report should describe the content of 10 full-length papers (8 pages or more), or 15 half-length papers (4-6 pages), or a proportional combination. The literature review should be submitted as a single PDF document of at most 20 pages, including at least the following sections:

Introduction: overall topic(s) of the review; depth/breadth tradeoff; place of each paper within the topic.
Description: For each paper: goals, new algorithms or experimental methods proposed (including equations as necessary to communicate the main ideas), relationship of the new algorithms to previous state of the art, evaluation methodology, evaluation results. Do not copy tables of results from the paper. You may copy figures if desired, but keep in mind that you will be graded on your prose description of the results, not on the figure.
Analysis: Study one or more aspect(s) of the papers in more depth. You are primarily being graded on your original analysis, but the relationship of your analysis to each of the 10 reviewed papers should also be clear (mention each paper at least once in this section).
Bibliography: list the papers.

The grading rubric will be comparable to this rubric from a previous course, though the point totals in each section may be adjusted somewhat.

Exams

Exams are short answer format, closed book, closed notes, no electronic devices. Sample exams will be posted on Compass.

Grading

MPs (four mini-projects): 60%.
Exams (two): 40%.

Grade cutoffs are not guaranteed! In the past, we have used grade cutoffs approximately as follows, where mu=class average, sigma=standard deviation (these are approximate specifications of the number of students who will receive grades of each type; see Wikipedia for more information). These cutoffs are intended as a guideline, but they are not guaranteed; they may be adjusted either upward or downward.

min(90%, mu+0.25sigma): A-, min(94%, mu+0.5sigma): A, min(99%, mu+1.65sigma): A+
min(75%, mu-sigma): B-, min(80%, mu-0.75sigma): B, min(85%, mu): B+
min(60%, mu-2.25sigma): C-, min(65%, mu-2sigma): C, min(70%, mu-1.25sigma): C+
min(45%, mu-3sigma): D-, min(50%, mu-2.75sigma): D, min(55%, mu-2.5sigma): D+

For example, in fall semester 2017, the resulting grade cutoffs were 99.00 A+, 91.00 A, 90.00 A-, 89.00 B+, 81.00 B, 77.00 B-, 75.00 C+, 71.00 C, 70.00 C-, 69.00 D+, 56.00 D, 45.00 D-.

Course Policies

Academic integrity: You are encouraged to discuss assignments with each other, but coding and writing of reports must be done individually or in your designated groups. You are also encouraged to conduct this discussion online, but do not post code on the class discussion group, either for the purpose of debugging or demonstrating a possible solution. Feel free to search the Web for tips or code snippets, provided this does not make the assignment trivial and all external sources are explicitly acknowledged in the report. At the first instance of cheating (copying from other students or unacknowledged sources on the Web), a grade of zero will be given for the respective assignment or test. At the second instance, you will automatically receive an F for the entire course.

Late penalty on assignments: For every day that your assignment is late, your score is multiplied by 0.9. No homework may be submitted more than 7 days late.

Only one submission per group: You may submit each assignment as often as you wish, but only one submission per group will be graded. Unless you tell us otherwise, we will grade your last submission before the deadline. If you wish us to grade a section that was submitted after the deadline, then a late penalty will apply to the entire assignment.

Requests for conflict exams: This course will have conflict midterm and final exams that will be announced well in advance, together with directions on how to sign up for them (including sign-up deadlines, which will always be 96 hours before the scheduled exam start time). To request a conflict, you must follow the directions. Conflict exam requests with less than 96 hours advance notice will only be granted for documented unforeseeable emergencies, e.g., unexpected illness, death, or incarceration.

Regrade requests: Regrade requests will only be accepted within a week after grades are released for an assignment and within 24 hours after grades are released on an exam. Note that the course staff reserves the right to regrade not only the items questioned by the student, but also the entire assignment or test. This may result in your overall score actually going down!

Incomplete requests: Requests for an incomplete in the course will only be accepted through the last day of class and must be accompanied by documentation of your special circumstances.