ICS 311 Spring 2023 General Course Information

Catalog Description

ICS 311 Algorithms (4 credits) Design and correctness of algorithms, including divide-and-conquer, greedy and dynamic programming methods. Complexity analyses using recurrence relations, probabilistic methods, and NP-completeness. Applications to order statistics, disjoint sets, B-trees and balanced trees, graphs, network flows, and string matching. Pre: 211 and 241, or consent.

Student Outcomes

Analyze a complex computing problem and apply principles of computing and other relevant disciplines to identify solutions

Important: Do not approach this course solely as a memorization task, where you can only do algorithms you are trained to do, like a circus animal. We want you to learn a “catalog” of algorithms, but you should also understand their analyses as examples that enable you to analyze unexpected algorithms in the future. This is essential for being successful in a fast changing field where you are expected to figure out whether a new idea will work, as you will be the computer scientist hired to do this. Take a look at the student comments on the course evaluations of the past offerings of this class.

Textbook

Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein, Introduction to Algorithms, Fourth Edition, The MIT Press, 2022.

Students are advised to purchase the textbook, as this book will serve as a lifelong reference. It is the second most cited publication in computer science!

Students are expected to know the material from prerequisite courses: ICS 141, 241, 111, 211, which will be heavily used in this course. Students are advised to keep their ICS 241 (Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science) textbooks for reference.

Instructor

Nodari Sitchinava
Associate Professor of ICS

Office: POST 309C
Email: nodari@hawaii.edu (Put “ICS 311” in the subject line. Use Laulima for questions that may also apply to other students.)
Office Hours: Mon 11am-12pm, Wed 4-5pm (in POST 309C)

Teaching Assistants

Armin Soltan
PhD Student in ICS

Office: POST 314-7
Email: asoltan@hawaii.edu (Put “ICS 311” in the subject line.)
Office Hours: Thursdays 5-7pm (in POST 309A)

Kai-Ying Lin
MS Student in ICS

Office: POST 314-9
Email: kylin@hawaii.edu (Put “ICS 311” in the subject line.)
Office Hours: Thursdays 3-5pm (in POST 309A)

Lecture Time & Location

Section 1: Mondays and Wednesdays 12-1:40pm in POST 319
Section 2: Mondays and Wednesdays 2-3:40pm in POST 319

Communications

Questions about Course Content: In general, questions about course content such as concepts, clarifications of assignments, etc. should be posted to the Laulima discussion forum of the week. This is because (1) other students can see our responses there, and thus also benefit; and (2) other students may notice the question and answer before the instructor or TA notices it. If you email us a question, we will post the reply in Laulima unless personal information is involved.

Personal Topics: For topics that are not of interest to other students or are personal, you may email us, or stop by office hours. (Of course you may also use office hours for course content questions.) If using email, put “ICS 311” in the subject line.

Communication with other students (e.g., group members): You can send email to other students in the course using the Laulima “Mailtool”. You don't need to know their real email address to do this.

Online Media

We use the course website https://www2.hawaii.edu/~nodari/teaching/s23/ for posting schedules, lecture notes and homeworks.

We use Laulima for communication and discussions. Please see this document on everything Laulima users should know.

We will use Google Docs for in-class problem solving, as it supports simultaneous editing.

Screencasts (videos) of lectures are available on YouTube (except the ones from the first week are in Laulima). They are linked from the individual Notes pages (the pages named Topic-XX.html) and from the Schedule page.