Welcome to CSE 390HA, the Honors section for CSE 142!

In this course we'll be exploring the history of technology, the impact it has on society, and the different facets of computer science. Throughout the course our goal is to explore these topics through a mix readings out of the book "9 Algorithms That Changed The Future" and articles, small exploratory homework assignments, and weekly discussions.

Required Book: 9 Algorithms That Changed The Future by John MacCormick

Course Evaluations:

The anonymous course evaluations are available here. Please take the time to fill them out, thanks!

To receive credit for this course: do the readings, attend at least 7 sections (you can miss 2), and participate in the discussion.



Course Content

Week #9 (05/31) - Industry Panel

Our last section! (so sad).This week we'll hear from some awesome following people about their experiences in the CSE industry / academic field.

Week #8 (05/24) - Computer Generated Art

Homework for next week:

  • Think of some questions for people in the CSE industry / academic field. We'll spend the time figuring out what you want to know. Some examples inlcude:
    • Did you do any research, how did you get into that, what was it like?
    • Did you do any internships, how did you get hired, what was it like?
    • What is it like to do coding at a production scale?
    • What classes have you enjoyed the most at UW?
    • What skills besides cs do you find most useful in your career?

Week #7 (05/17) - Dear Data Project

This week we analyzed the dear data project and each other's visualizations of our computer usage time.

Homework for next week:

Week #6 (05/10) - Data Visualization

This week we talked about how data visualization can influence your opinion and knowledge of a social situation. We also discussed how humans interpret data and visuals (like color, position accuracy, etc), and the effects that has on the design of data visualizations.

Homework for the next session:

  • Analyze this visualization from the dear data project. (all weeks).
  • If you forgot to last week, collect data about your computer usage for the rest of the next week (Wednesday-Monday). Collect the data with the context surrounding the data to better answer a question about yourself that you'd like to answer. Some questions might be: when am I using the internet? How frequently do I take breaks from the computer? How is the computer helping or hurting my social life? What times during the day do I mostly look at screens? Is my laptop usage vastly different from my phone usage? etc, etc.
  • With that collected data, come up with a data visualization to either (1) answer an interesting question about your computer usage or (2) convey something interesting and artistic about your computer usage. Here is a great example from a student last quarter.

Week #5 (05/03) - Intro to Web Development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript

We built a beautiful kitten machine website to load in a new random kitten on click of a button.

Resources:

  • kittens.html content of the website. Download and open with a text editor or view source to see file contents instead of rendering as a website.
  • kittens.css styles of the website.
  • kittens.js interactive script code attached to events of the website.

Homework for the next session:

  • Watch a short video on the future of data vis from Jeff Heer, Professor at UW.
  • Watch a short video on Hans Rosling demonstrating how data is important for global planning and reasoning about the current state of the world.
  • Find a cool data visualization that conveys some interesting information about the world. If you're stuck, politics are usually an interesting place to start.
  • Collect data about your computer usage for the rest of the next week. Collect the data with the context surrounding the data to better answer a question about yourself that you'd like to answer. Some questions might be: when am I using the internet? How frequently do I take breaks from the computer? How is the computer helping or hurting my social life? What times during the day do I mostly look at screens? Is my laptop usage vastly different from my phone usage? etc, etc.

Week #4 (04/26) - Current Research in Computer Science

Students from each group presented interesting things they found about each sub area of research. Some of the links found and discussed included:

  • A TED Talk on the art of neural networks.
  • An article on genetically modified cyborg dragonflies
  • A page on robot fish that work as a distributed school.
  • An article on the mothership drone project from Amazon.
  • A video of robots playing soccer.
  • A video on 2D animation and Paperman.
  • A video on how snow was made to look real for Frozen.
  • A video on the making of the Chemical Brothers - Wide Open video.
  • A video on the making of fur for Zootopia.

Homework for the next session:

No homework! Good luck studying for your midterm!

Week #3 (04/19) - Public Key Cryptography and Security

In this section, we discussed the mechanism for public key cryptography and how modern cryptography works.

We also discussed the security of the internet of things, adversarial security, and some of the projects UW has worked on recently in the security area.

Homework for the next session:

We'll be exploring several different areas of current research in computer science. Each person will be assigned one of the following topics to present to the class next week. Linked are some suggested resources to read/watch, but any extra digging you'd like to do is welcome.

Week #2 (04/12) - Search Engine Indexing and PageRank

In this section, we discussed how basic indexing and the PageRank algorithm works. We talked about what matters for indexing including word location and other metadata. Within that discussion we discussed the idea of meta as a whole, and what kinds of metadata exist for webpages. For PageRank we talked about the concept that what is important is for other important websites to link to you. We talked about how this eliminates spam and makes it difficult for malicious websites to become important by piggybacking off of important authentic websites (like Wikipedia).

Then we had a short discussion about how the internet works and how a browser gets the data of a webpage to render. In this discussion we talked about crawlers and how crawlers might operate.

Homework for the next session:

  • Read chapter 4, Public Key Cryptography, from 9 Algorithms That Changed The Future
  • Watch this 20 minute video from UW professor, Yoshi Kohno, describing the internet of things and adversarial security

Week #1 (04/05) - Introduction

In this section, I introduced the goals of the honors section:

  • To explore the impact of technology and computer science concepts on society
  • To explore computer science and its applications as an academic field
  • To preview what a career as a professional computer programmer or researcher is like
  • To look more indepth at how we apply computational thinking to our daily lives

I emphasized that while CSE 142 is all about how to program computers, computer science (and computational thinking) is much larger in scope than just programming (or even physical computers). As a group, we explored some interesting ideas:

  • The many different ways we use technology in our lives and the many different kinds of apps out there.
  • How social behaviors have changed with technology.
  • Consumerism and the way we interact with ads and shopping online.
  • How machine learning and predictive algorithms are changing the way we interact with computers
  • The different kinds of data being collected about us and the privacy concerns behind that.

Homework for the next session:

  • Fill out this catalyst survey with your experiences, interests, and goals for the course
  • Buy the course textbook, read the introduction and first two chapters, Search Engine Indexing and Page Rank, from 9 Algorithms That Changed The Future
  • (Super optional) Come say hi! I'm in my office, CSE 450, most of the time and would be happy to chat with you about your interests / concerns / CSE 142 / whatever in person.