ICS 451 organization

Instructor: Edo Biagioni, esb@hawaii.edu. See here for office hours.

This class meets Mondays and Wednesdays 10:30-11:45 in Holmes 243.


Goals and Learning Objectives

In this course, students will:

Textbook

The textbook is "Computer Networking -- a Top-Down Approach", by James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross (Prentice-Hall), fourth edition (2007). The textbook is available from the UH bookstore. Due to popular demand, I have also selected optional reference books and links for sockets programming. These optional books are not available from the UH bookstore. It is most likely that these books are stocked or can be ordered by your favorite bookstore -- shop early to be sure to get the textbook(s).

Organization

This course has exercises, projects, exams, and reviews.

The exercises are required but not graded. In the past, students who fail to completely understand the exercises, and who do not get assistance, generally do poorly on the projects and all too frequently drop the class. Do the exercises! You may turn them in if you wish to have them checked or if you have questions. The reviews are credit/no credit.

Because your project code will be reviewed by your fellow students, it will not be treated as confidential.

All students are required to join the course mailing list. Students will generally be added by the instructor at the beginning of the semester, but are requested to make sure they are on the mailing list (usually, a message is sent by the system when an email address is added).

Grades are assigned based on your performance on:

Grading will use the standard cutoffs of 97% (A+), 93% (A), 90% (A-), 87% (B+), 83% (B), 80% (B-), 77% (C+), 73% (C), 70% (C-), 67% (D+), 63% (D), 60% (D-). Depending on the performance of the class as a whole, I may at the end of the course decide to grade more generously (i.e. grade on a curve), but this is not likely. In grading, I will be looking for evidence of understanding of the material and evidence of your ability to do work in the field. There is no extra credit -- students must do well on the exams and projects to do well in the course.

The first project must be done individually. The second and third project may be done individually or in teams of your choosing, up to a maximum of three students. For the first two projects you must use the C language, the third project may be in any language that I can easily grade.

Projects and reviews must be turned in on time, or they will suffer a 20% per day penalty. For example, a project that scores 93% and is two days late will be given a score of 53% instead. Out of courtesy, please email the instructor before the deadline to let him know that you will be turning in the assignment late, and give an estimate for when the assignment will be turned in.

Exams must be take when scheduled, unless you have prior permission of the instructor, or a well-documented hardship situation. Even in case of a hardship situation, late exams are also penalized at 20% per day, so it is to your advantage to make up the exam as soon as possible. The make-up exam may be different from the regular exam.


Cheating

In this course, students may use material from any published source but only if the material is properly attributed to the source . For example, if half of of a project's code is taken from a web site, each of the portions of code that is taken from the website must be identified with a comment indicating the URL from which the code was obtained. The instructor usually comes up with assignments for which code is not available in published sources, so there is a good chance that adapting such code will not be much easier than writing the code yourself.

In general, cheating means presenting the work of somebody else as one's own, or providing one's work to somebody else to help them cheat.

Except for code explicitly marked as described above, all code in projects should be written by the people submitting the project. This means that once a group is formed, it cannot be changed, and all members of the group will get the same grade on the project.

Friends are not a published source, so students are not allowed to use material from their friends.

There is, of course, to be no collaboration whatsoever on exams.

No Cheating Policy: any cheating will result in a grade of 0 for the assignment or exam the first time it is detected, and a grade of F for the course for any subsequent instance. Any instance of cheating will also be recorded in the student's ICS department file, and may be reported to the office of the Dean of Students, possibly resulting in disciplinary action against the student. The Student Conduct Code may provide more information.

Since exercises are not graded, collaboration on the exercises is strongly encouraged.

If you have any questions, please contact the instructor.


Disabilities

Any student who feels s/he may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability is invited to contact me privately. I would be happy to work with you, and the KOKUA Program (Office for Students with Disabilities) to ensure reasonable accommodations in my course. KOKUA can be reached at (808) 956-7511 or (808) 956-7612 (voice/text) in room 013 of the Queen Lili'uokalani Center for Student Services.

Improvements

Any suggestions for improving these web pages should be sent to the instructor.