Harvard CS 226/MIT 6.889 - Fall 2017 Syllabus

Announcements

• Course now has a Piazza site.
• Email us at sketchingbigdata-f17-staff@seas.harvard.edu to be added to the course mailing list.
• Office hours are listed on the staff page.

Specifics

• Lecture time: Tuesday & Thursday 2:30–4pm
• First lecture: Thursday, August 31, 2017, at MD G125
• Lecture room: Maxwell-Dworkin G125 (Harvard) / 32-124 (MIT), see lectures page for details.
• Harvard College/GSAS Catalog Number: 3730
• Contact: Email sketchingbigdata-f17-staff@seas.harvard.edu

Grading

• Scribing lectures (10%). See lectures page.
• Homework (40%). See assignments page.
• Final project, paper (40%) and presentation (10%). See project page.

Scribe notes and final projects must be typeset in LaTeX. If you are not familiar with LaTeX, see this introduction. The lecture and assignment pages also have templates to get you started.

Homework Policies

We expect to have roughly 3 problem sets for the course, subject to the following policies:

• No late days. No extensions.
• Each problem set contributes the same amount to your final grade.
• It is recommended, though not required, that problem set submissions be typeset in LaTeX; here is a template to start with.
• Solutions do not need to include all calculations, trivial details etc. Just prove to us that you found the solution, and that you understand it well.
• Homework is always due at 11:59pm on the due date.
• Collaboration to solve homework problems is allowed, but students must then write up the solutions on their own and list names of all collaborators at the beginning of the first page.
• You may read papers to help find solutions to problems, but they must be properly cited, and you must explain the solution in a way that demonstrates your understanding (a homework submission simply stating “this problem is solved in paper X” would receive no credit, for example).

Textbook

There is no textbook for this class (we will rely on our scribe notes).