COMS12303: Unit Materials

The lecturers for this unit are:

Simon Hollis

David May

• Unit Timetable
• Lab Timetable
• Lab Opening Hours

Schedule of Lectures, Discussions and Presentations 2008-9

There will be 17 one-hour lectures, three hours of discussion group activity, and four hours of research presentation in this course. You are also expected to perform a substantial amount of independent research to supplement the material given in lectures.

The timetable now follows. Please note that you will attend all lectures, discussion groups and presentation sessions.

Warning is given that some slot allocations and lecturers may change as term goes on, to best suit the needs of the students attending the course. The venues may also change. Therefore, please check the timetable below regularly to ensure you have the most up-to-date information.

You may also click on the various lecture titles to bring up a copy of their slides from a given lecture (where available).

Lectures

Discussion Groups

Essay Deadlines

Presentations

Week	Date	Material	Date	Material	Essay
1	Oct 7th	Simon Hollis and David May - Introduction and Pre-history	Oct 9th	Simon Hollis - Research Techniques
2	Oct 14th	David May - Early Machines	Oct 16th	Nigel Smart - Cryptographic Machines
3	Oct 21st	David May - Early Machines	Oct 23rd	Nigel Smart - Cryptographic Machines
4	Oct 28th	Simon Hollis - Technical Writing and Introduction to LaTeX	Oct 30th	Simon Hollis - Communication and The Internet	02 Nov
5	Nov 4th	Daniel Page - Self-modifying code: Uniting Machines and Programming Languages	Nov 6th	David May - History of Programming Languages
6	Nov 11th	Feedback and Discussion of Early Machines Essays	Nov 13th	David May - History of Programming Languages	16 Nov
7	Nov 18th	Ksenia Shalonova - Speech Synthesis	Nov 20th	Ksenia Shalonova - Automatic Speech Recognition
8	Nov 25th	Feedback and Discussion of Programming Languages, Communication and Networks	Nov 27th	Walterio Mayol-Cuevas - Robotics	30 Nov
9	Dec 2nd	Andrew Charlesworth (slides) and Munitions, Wiretaps and MP3s	Dec 4th	Mike Fraser - Social Impact of Computing (HCI)
10	Dec 9th	Feedback and Discussion of Speech and Robotics	Dec 11th	Dave Cliff - Learning from the Past to Predict the Future	14 Dec
Christmas Vacation
11	Jan 13th	Presentation slot 1	Jan 15th	Presentation slot 2
12	Jan 20th	Presentation slot 3	Jan 22nd	Presentation slot 4
End of First Semester

Format of the Course

The Origins of Computer Science course is intended to promote a student's ability to confidently and competently perform personal research into topics related to Computer Science. Using delivered lectures as a basis, and discussion groups for guidance, students will be expected to perform self-motivated and independent research into historical topics in the field of Computer Science. This research will involve the use and assimilation of external references, both on paper and on the internet, to produce coherent and intelligent discussion pieces for both delivery to the other students on the course, and for marking purposes. Students are expected to make use of external resources and time outside lectures to promote their understanding and breadth of knowledge around the core topics, as introduced in lectures. Similarly, the discussion groups will serve as a forum for the exchange of ideas, and the construction of reasoned arguments, in preparation for their committal into pieces of assigned coursework.

Deliverables

Coursework

Four pieces of coursework are expected from each student on the course, and will be assessed in real-time. Feedback will be provided, and students may wish to use discussion sessions to elaborate on this. The coursework is intended to show a student's ability to assimilate many viewpoints and facts from a range of viewpoints, to produce a well reasoned summary of a particular topic.

Note: There will not be enough material for an essay in the lectures alone --- you will have do perform some exploration on your own before starting writing!

Further information on the coursework, including the marking scheme is available here.

Format of coursework

The coursework is to be a précis of the set topic, being no longer than one side of A4 (excluding references), when in a 12pt font. Essays submitted that extend to longer than a single side of A4 (excluding references) will be marked punitively, so students are well advised to keep their discussions brief and relevant.

Presentation

Toward the end of the course, each student will be expected to produce and deliver a presentation of a chosen topic of interest, researched during the unit. Presentations are to be given in December and January, and will be worth 20% of the unit mark.

Information on the format of presentations and the allocation of students to timeslots is available.

Support

It is important to effectively utilise the various forms of support available for this unit; see the page about communication in the department for a general introduction.

Discussion sessions: It is anticipated that the scheduled discussion sessions in this unit will provide the majority of the support and feedback needed.

Forum: The forum can provide a useful way for you to help each other and to get questions answered by the lecturers or lab supervisors, both of whom will take part in online discussions:

• COMS12303 Forum 2008-9

Feel free to post questions and so on; we'll try to answer them as soon as possible. However, before you use the forum you should make sure you have first tried to help yourself by reading lecture slides and course texts for example. Note that forum posts from previous years might be useful for reference:

Office Hours: The lecturers don't have set office hours, but are in their offices most of the time. You are welcome to drop in at any time for problems which can't be solved via the other routes above.

Email: Email is very useful for the lecturers to contact all of you, but it isn't so useful for you to contact the lecturers. They often get completely swamped with emails, so use of the forum is preferred for any questions. Following this policy for all but vital (or personal) problems will hopefully ensure common questions and answers are quickly made available to everyone.

Feedback: Unlike some other units, coursework assignments in this unit are not automatically marked. This means the feedback will be slower, but of a fairly high quality. In particular we aim to provide a model answer as well as individual feedback. If you need additional feedback, please seek this via the routes above.

Links and Resources

Papers to be read before their related lecture slots

• For Robotics on the 12th of October
  • W. Grey Walter, A Machine that learns, Scientific American, August 1951.

Papers for Background and Discussion

• Formalisms for computation (i.e. how computing things was thought about, sometimes before computers even existed)
  • A.M. Turing. On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 42(2), 1937.
  • M. Gardner The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway's New Solitaire Game "Life". Scientific American 223, 120--123, 1970.
  • Boole: Laws of Thought
  • Jevons: Logical Piano
  • Godel: Undecidable Propositions
• Realisation of computers (i.e. how the first physical computing devices were designed and constructed)
  • J. von Neumann. First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. Technical Report, 1945.
  • A.M. Turing. Proposed Electronic Calculator (ACE). Technical Report, 1945.
  • G. Bell and W.D. Strecker. What We Learned From the PDP-11. International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 1--14, 1976.
  • D.A. Patterson. Reduced Instruction Set Computers. Communications of the ACM 28(1), 8--21, 1985.
  • Babbage: Representing Mechnical Action.
  • Shannon: Relay and Switching
  • Von Neumann: Edvac Draft
• Interfacing hardware and software (i.e. how early operating systems were designed, developed and used)
  • D.J. Wheeler. Programme Organization and Initial Orders for the EDSAC. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 202(1071), 573--589, 1950.
  • S. Gill. The Diagnosis of Mistakes in Programmes on the EDSAC. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 206(1087), 538--554, 1951.
  • D.M. Ritchie and K. Thompson. The UNIX Time-Sharing System. Communications of the ACM 17(7), 365--375, 1974.
  • D.M. Ritchie. A Stream Input-Output System. Bell Laboratories Technical Journal 63, 1897--1910, 1984.
  • P. A. Karger and Roger R. Schell Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation. Proceedings of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, December 9-13, 2002.
• Theory and practice of programming (i.e. how programming languages and techniques were formalised and developed)
  • E.W. Dijkstra. Recursive Programming. Numerische Mathematik 2, 312--318, 1960.
  • E.W. Dijkstra. Go To Statement Considered Harmful. Communications of the ACM 11(3), 147--148, 1968.
  • N. Wirth. Program Development by Stepwise Refinement. Communications of the ACM 14(4), 221--227, 1971.
  • D.M. Ritchie. The Development of the C Language. ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages (HOPL-2), 201--208, 1993.
• Sharing and communication information (i.e. means of sending and recieving data, and issues such as the security of that data)
  • C.E Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27, 379--423, 1948.
  • R.W. Hamming. Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes. Bell System Technical Journal 29, 147--160, 1950.
  • R.M. Metcalf and D.R. Boggs. Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks. Communications of the ACM 19(7), 395--404, 1976.
  • S. Brin and L. Page. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30, 107--117, 1998.
• Applications and users (i.e. how and why humans use computers and why this is an important aspect to consider in their design)
  • A.M. Turing. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. MIND: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy LIX(236), 1950.
  • G.A. Miller. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. The Psychological Review 63, 81--97, 1956.
  • J.R. Searle. Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417--457, 1980.
  • V.W.Zue and J.R.Glass. Conversational Interfaces: Advances and Challenges. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 88, no. 8, 1166--1180, August, 2000.
  • R. Stiefelhagen, C. Fuegen, P. Gieselmann, H. Holzapfel, K. Nickel, A. Waibel. Natural Human-Robot Interaction using Speech, Gaze and Gestures, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2004.
• Speech Processing: Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis
  • K. H. Davis, R. Biddulph, and S. Balashek. Automatic Recognition of Spoken Digits. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,vol 24, issue 6, 637--642, 1952.
  • N.Umeda. Linguistic Rules for Text-to-Speech Synthesis. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol.64, issue 4, 443--451, 1976.
  • J.Olive. Rule Synthesis of Speech from Dyadic Units. Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, IEEE International Conference on ICASSP '77, vol 2, 568--570, 1977.
  • B.H.Juang and L.R.Rabiner. Automatic Speech Recognition - A Brief History of the Technology. Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, 2005.
  • D.Jurafsky and J.Martin. Speech Synthesis. Speech and Language Processing, 2007.
  • D.Jurafsky and J.Martin. Automatic Speech Recognition. Speech and Language Processing, 2007.
• Trends
  • D. Cliff, C. O'Malley and J. Taylor Future Issues in Socio-Technical Change for UK Education. Beyond Current Horizons, Futurelab, 2008.

  Simulators

  • An EDSAC simulator.
  • An ENIAC simulator.
  • A Turing Machine simulator.

  People

  • Edsger Dijkstra
  • Don Knuth
  • Brian Kernighan
  • Bjarne Stroustrup
  • Dennis Ritchie
  • Steve Wozniak
  • Jef Raskin

  Books

  • The "Chicago Manual of Style; The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors and Publishers." (15th Edition) --- University of Chicago Press.

  Other Sources

  • Wikipedia list of important papers in Computer Science.
  • Wikipedia list of open problems in Computer Science.
  • Wikipedia list of pioneers in Computer Science.

  • Historical Usenet posts.
    • Announcement of WWW.
    • Announement of Linux.
    • Announement of GNU.
    • Announement of Mosaic.
    • Duff's Device.
  • The Computer History Museum.
  • The Multics History Project.
  • The Computer 50 Manchester Mark 1 celebration.
  • The History of Computing Project.
  • The National Archive for the History of Computing.
  • The The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC).

  • The DBLP publication index.
  • The Internet RFC archive.
  • The JSTOR publication archive.
  • The Royal Society publication archive.

  Discussion pages

  • Who made the first computer?

  Other Courses

  • Key Papers in Computer Science at Weizmann Institute.
  • Reading the Classics at UC Berkeley.
  • Computing: History and Culture at University of Manchester.