This course provides a survey of how CS can help solve problems in other disciplines, such as Biology and Sociology. For each discipline, we first discuss a sample problem(s) and the associated background knowledge to understand the problem(s). We then discuss possible algorithmic solutions and compare them. Faculty members from other disciplines might be invited to help discuss the problems and associated background knowledge. Homework assignments include implementation and comparison of the algorithms.

Disciplines and problems

• Weeks 1-2: Sociology: small world (how many friends are there between Obama and you?) and connectors (who are more important/influential?) in social networks
• Weeks 2-5: Geography: localization (where are you?) and turn-by-turn navigation (how do you get there?)
• Weeks 6-7: Marketing: advertisement in search (google) and recommendation systems (netflix, amazon)
• Week 8: Midterm exam and discussion of solution
• Weeks 9-11: Finance: credit card fraud detection (is that you trying to spend $1000 at Best Buy in Alaska?)
• Weeks 12-13: Law: scheduling attorneys to judges (time, workload, specialty, personality, ... constraints)
• Weeks 14-16: Biology: DNA sequence alignment (are you a close relative of your cat? is the suspect the criminal?)

Homework Assignments (Submit Server)

• HW1: toy-bowtie.txt, toy-friends.txt, toy-graph.txt
• HW2: melbourne.txt
• HW3:
  toy-rating.txt, toy-quiz.txt, [custID: 0-9, movieID: 0-4, rating: 1-5]
  nf-rating.txt, nf-quiz.txt [custID: 001-999, movieID: 00001-17770, rating 1-5; 180 customers, 180 ratings to predict]
  
• HW4: toy-email.txt, toy-quiz.txt, sa-email.txt, sa-quiz.txt
• HW5, SysUtil.java
  toy-attorney1.txt, toy-attorney2.txt, toy-attorney3.txt, toy-attorney4.txt, toy-attorney5.txt, toy-attorney6.txt, toy-attorney7.txt

Slides

• Introduction
• Sociology
• Geography
• Marketing
• Finance Decision Trees
• Law
• Biology

Evaluation

• Homework Assignments (50%)
• Midterm exam (20%), Final exam (30%)

• Students are encouraged to help each other on assignments, but plagiarism (copying) is prohibited.
  • first violation: zero on assignment/test
  • second violation: 'F' for the course
• Late assignments are accepted, but 20% is deducted for each day.
• Documentation constitutes 10% of each programming assignment.

• CSE 2010 Algorithms and Data Structures ["C" or above]