In person lectures will be held in CSE2 (Gates Hall) room G20 at 1:30pm-2:20pm.
Lecture attendance is optional, but strongly encouraged. In the event you are unable to attend a lecture, recordings of lectures are automatically posted to Canvas under the Panopto tool.
CSE 421 has an associated quiz section on Thursdays and the course will be 3 or 4 credits depending on how you enroll. CSE 421 itself is 3 credits. To get the 4th credit you will need to sign up for CSE 490D also.
While enrolling in CSE 490D is technically optional, in most situations it is to your benefit to do so. CSE490D has no associated tasks, so enrolling does not increase your workload in the course. Your grade for 490D will match your grade in CSE421. The only difference in signing up for just CSE421 vs. CSE421 with CSE490D is the one credit.
| Instructor | TAs | |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Nathan Brunelle | Profiles |
| Location | Allen Center (CSE) 434 | See Calendar |
| Office Hours | MW 2:30-4:30 or appointment | See Calendar |
| Phone | (none) | |
| brunelle@cs.washington.edu | use Ed Discussion Board |
For communication about course content, the Ed Discussion Board is preferred to email. For communication about personal circumstances, email or is preferred. If you email, include either CSE 421
, 421
, or Algorithms
in the subject line to prevent your email from being deprioritized my inbox and resulting in a delayed response.
Our TAs are students too, with duties and work outside of their TAing. Please do not ask them to act as your TA except at the scheduled on-the-clock times they have listed as their office hours. They are also kind people; please don’t put them in the position of having to say no or (worse) being nice to you at the expense of their own scholarship.
There is a textbook associated with the course: Algorithm Design
by Jon Kleinberg and Éva Tardos, Addison-Wesley, 2006. The International Edition is the same in paperback and there are other ways of accessing the textbook content if you only want online access to it. This textbook gives a very good feel for how algorithm designers actually think about designing and analyzing algorithms. The authors wrote the book to be read sequentially, and so random access to the content may result in some confusion.
We will cover almost all of chapters 1-8 of the Kleinberg/Tardos text plus material from later chapters. In addition, we will borrow a small amount of material on divide and conquer algorithms from Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach, by Udi Manber, Addison-Wesley 1989 and possibly other sources. We will make all extra materials (outside of Kleinber/Tardos) available.
I do my best to make lectures and sections as valuable, engaging, and enlightening as possible for all students. For a schedule of topics, please see the course webpage. Although we believe nearly all students will benefit from attending all meetings, we also respect that as mature (ideally) college students, you are entrusted to figure out how best to learn and make use of your time here. Hence, we will not have any in-class activities which impact your grade with the exception of the already-posted exams (midterm and final). I will make a best effort to post all lecture materials (recordings, slides documents, etc.) on the course webpage, including video recordings of lectures. Be advised that there are occasional technical difficulties which sometimes cause the recordings to fail, and even when they do succeed these recordings may not be an adequate substitute for attending class live.
All assignments will be posted and submitted either in person (for exams) or on Gradescope. All grading will be conducted on Gradescope. You will be asked to perform two categories of evaluations:
crama set of solutions. There will be approximately three of these problems per homework, they will each be out of 25 points.
We will consider the grade assigned by the following weighted average (of percentages) to be a guideline for calculating grades.
| Task | Weight | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Homeworks | 60% | There will be 8 total assignments. This grade will inclue your 7 highest mechanical problems (70 points) and your 20 highest long-form problems (500 points). Therefore this grade will be calculated as a score out of 570 points. |
| Exams | 40% | There will be 2 total, a midterm (counting for 15%) and a cumulative final exam (counting for 25%). |
This numerical calculation is to be considered a guideline on your score in the course. Final grades may take other factors into account so that your grade is the most accurate reflection of your understanding of course materials.
To help you to keep track of your standing in the course and to interpret grades as they are returned, we will provide the following Gradepoint Guarantees
. If you score in the course using the weighted average above is at or above the thresholds below, we guarantee you will receive a course GPA that is at least the amount shown. At the end of the quarter we may adjust these thresholds in order to maintain consistent grading with past offerings of the course, but we guarantee we will only relax them. That is, your final GPA may possibly be higher than those given, but will definitely not be lower.
| If your grade is | Then your course GPA will be |
|---|---|
| ≥92% | ≥3.5 |
| ≥85% | ≥3.0 |
| ≥70% | ≥2.0 |
Instead of late assignment-days, we will count late problem-days submitted on homeworks (each problem will be its own gradescope submission to facilitate this). You have a total of 10 late problem-days over the course of the quarter. Only 2 of these late days may be used per problem. Without permission from the course instructor, no problems can be submitted more than 48 hours late. Any problems submitted late after you have used your ten late problem-days will receive 50% credit. Problem-days will be allocated greedily, so the first 10 late problem-days will be used on the first late problems, with all late submissions thereafter receiving a grade penalty (i.e. we do not perform any grade-optimization). Problem drops will be decided after lateness penalties are assigned.
Late submissions are intended to handle the normal
difficulties during a quarter (midterms in another class, family birthday party to attend, bad colds). If you have a more extreme situation (e.g., an extended illness or a family emergency) contact the course instructor (via email or Ed post) for accommodations.
We acknowledge that professors and TAs are people (glad to get that confession off of my chest!), and people make mistakes. For this reason, you are able to request regrades on exercises and the midterm within either one week of your grade being returned or by the date of the final exam, whichever date is sooner. You will only have 48 hours to submit regrade requests for the final exam.
Please only submit a regrade request if you believe the rubric was misapplied to your submission or if there was a keying error for the task. In the case of a misapplication of the rubric, identify specifically what in your submission demonstrates the misapplication and suggest how you believe the rubric should be correctly applied. In the case of a keying error, state and justify why you believe your answer should be considered correct. Disagreement with the existance or weighting of a rubric item is not considered a valid reason for a regrade request.
Behave professionally.
Never abuse anyone, including the emotional abuse of blaming others for your mistakes. Kindness is more important than correctness.
Let our TAs be students when they are not on the clock as TAs.
Lack of professionalism has an overall detrimental impact on our community of learning.
I always hope everyone will behave honestly. I know we all are sometimes tempted by the easy path that dishonesty can enable; if you do something you regret, the sooner you tell me the sooner (and more leniently) we can correct it.
For Exercises and Programming Projects you may use external materials with the following restrictions:
stuck.
I collaborated with Brett Wortzman on solving the recurrence relation, I consulted for the running times of Binary Heap operations, Miya Natsuhara helped me to identify a corner case in an earlier version of my solution.
whiteboard only(defined below).
hintsor entire solutions to the problems. Limit your searching to background information only. (For example, do not consult a GitHub repository posted by a former student.)
Whiteboard Only
collaboration is meant to convey the type of discussion where participants gather around a whiteboard to solve a problem together, without taking any notes from their discussion, and then erasing the whiteboard before they disperse.
In particular, you may discuss tasks and their solutions, but the only thing you may take away from your discussion is your brain. This means you may not produce any records or artifacts from your collaborations, including: notes, screenshots, photos, figures, code, audio/video recordings, documents (inluding google docs), links, or any other digital or tangible thing. Nor may you share any files, links, etc. with other students outside of a collaboration session. Any substantially similar expression of the same solution can only occur if collaboration extends beyond whiteboard only
, and so will be considered as evidence of a policy violation.
The University of Washington strives to provide accessibility to all students. If you require an accommodation to fully access this course, please work with the Disability Resources for Students (DRS). If you are unsure if you require an accommodation, or to learn more about their services, begin by visiting the DRS website. For this course, we ask that students with special circumstances let us know as soon as possible, preferably during the first week of class or as soon as accomodations are approved.
Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.
I am dedicated to providing a safe and equitable learning enironment for all students. To that end, it is vital that you know two values that I hold as critically important:
If you or someone you know has been affected by power-based personal violence, I encourage you to use Safecampus as a resource. As your professor and a human, know that I care about you and your well-being and stand ready to provide support and resources to the best of my ability.
Additionally, if at any point you are made to feel uncomfortable, disrespected, or excluded by a staff member or fellow student, please report the incident so that we may address the issue and maintain a supportive and inclusive learning environment. Should you feel uncomfortable bringing up an issue with a me or another staff member directly, you may consider contacting the Office of the Ombud.
Bad things happen. People forget things and make mistakes. Bad days coincide with due dates. Etc.
If you believe that circumstances warrant a change in deadline, a second chance, or some other accommodation in order to more accurately synchronize grade with knowledge, come talk to me and we’ll resolve the situation as best we can.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or isolated, there are many individuals here who are ready and wanting to help. The University of Washington Counseling Center offers short-term counseling students and crisis service for urgent situations. Call 206-543-1240 (or 866-427-4747 for after hours and weekend crisis assistance) to get started and schedule an appointment.