CS 332 Course Information

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Instructor: Ellen Hildreth

Contact info: SCI E112, x3025, ehildreth@wellesley.edu

Office Hours: Tuesday 11:00-2:00, Wednesday 11:00-12:15 & 2:00-3:00, Thursday 12:30-3:30, Friday 11-12:30 & 1:30-2:30. Seminars and meetings are sometimes scheduled during these hours, so I will send e-mail at the beginning of each week about any changes to my office hours. Appointments can be made at other times.

Lectures: Tuesday/Friday 9:50-11:00 in SCI E211

Lab: There is an additional 70-minute lab class that will meet in the CS Department's MAC classroom, SCI S160A, on Wednesday at 9:50-11:00.

Prerequisites
The formal prerequisite for this course is CS112 or CS230 or permission of instructor. Given the shift of the course software to the MATLAB environment, CS332 can now be taken with programming background from CS111. No prior experience with MATLAB is needed.

Reading
There is no required textbook for this course. Notes, book excerpts and journal articles will be distributed throughout the semester. Some useful background material will be drawn from the book, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, by Stephen Palmer. Additional books on computer vision and biological vision are available on one of the bookshelves in room SCI S160A.

Course Evaluation
There will be 7 homework assignments, most of which will require computer work. The assignments will use vision software written in MATLAB that can be run on MACs and PCs.

There will be two in-class exams on the following dates:
   Exam 1: Friday, October 16
   Exam 2: Tuesday, November 17
There will be no final exam.

Finally, there will be a final project that involves the independent exploration of a vision topic that is of interest to you. Topics can be explored through current literature that may include journal articles, excerpts from books, or online papers, and can include an implementation of some sort. Some possible areas of exploration are listed on the final project web page. During the last two classes of the semester, each student will give a 10-15 minute presentation of her final project work. A final paper on this work is due by the end of final exam period, on Monday, December 21.

Your final grade will be based on the following components of your work: assignments (45%), the two exams (20% each), the final project (10%) and class participation (5%). All of your submitted work will count toward your grade.

Late Assignment Policy
All assignments are due in class on the advertised due date, which will usually be a Friday. An assignment due on a particular day will be accepted until 5:00 on that day without penalty. After the due date, the assignment can still be submitted, but will lose 20% credit for each calendar day after the due date. In extenuating circumstances (e.g. sickness, personal crisis, family problems), you may request an extension without penalty. Please try to contact me before the due date.

Collaboration Policy
With regard to collaboration, you are encouraged to discuss assignments with other students and to exchange ideas about how to solve problems. However, I ask that you compose your own final solutions to assignment problems. In particular, for problems that involve computer work, either programming or running simulations, you may discuss strategies for approaching these problems with classmates and receive general debugging advice from them, but you should write your own code, run your own simulations, and write up the conclusions of your work on your own. For problems requiring only a written analysis, you can again discuss strategies for solving the problems with classmates, but should write out the details of the problem solution on your own. In the lab classes, you may sometimes work in pairs, and lab work can be shared between you and your partner. If you have questions about this policy, please talk to me.

Course Directory
Materials for this course will be available on the CS file server, in the directory /home/cs332. Software to be downloaded will be placed in the subdirectory /home/cs332/download. Course web pages are stored in /home/cs332/public_html and available from a web browser at the following site: http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs332

Puma Accounts
Each student will have an individual account on the CS file server. If you have taken other computer science courses at Wellesley, you probably already have an account. If you have only taken CS111 or CS112, your account needs to be upgraded. See the account request page to create a new account, upgrade an existing one, or change your password.

Course Software
All of the CS332 course software is written in MATLAB. At Wellesley, MATLAB 7.4, together with some useful toolboxes that include the Image Processing Toolbox, is available on the public Macs and PCs, and on the CS Department's Linux workstations. Installation CD's are available at the Knapp Media Center that can be used to install MATLAB onto personal computers (Macs or PCs) for use on the campus network. For more information about this option, see the Wellesley Desktop Computing webpage. The MATLAB software is key-served, so there are a limited number of copies that can be used at one time. Please be sure to exit MATLAB when you are done using it! A student version of MATLAB can be purchased for $99.00 at the Mathworks website.

Course Conference
There is a CS332 conference on FirstClass named CS332-01-F09. The CS332-01-F09 Announcements subconference will be used to post announcements about CS department activities such as seminars and social events. I will use the CS332-01-F09 Q&A subconference to post class announcements, such as corrections to assignments and clarifications of material discussed in class. I encourage you to post questions or comments here that may be of general interest to the class. I will read messages posted on the conference on a regular basis and post answers to questions found there. You are also welcome to post answers to other students' questions. You should plan on reading the conference messages on a regular basis. The CS332-01-F09 Drop subconference will be used for dropping electronic files related to your assignment solutions.

Students with Special Needs
If you have special needs of any kind, please meet with me to discuss accommodations that may be helpful to you.