Welcome to CS349 web page!
[home]
[syllabus]
[lecture notes]
[assignments]
[project]
[documentation]
Course Description
Instructor
Time and Location
About assignments
Project grades
Exams
Grading Policy
Collaboration Policy
About Lecture Notes
FirstClass Conference
Other Resources
Your feedback (an anonymous form)
NEW! Click here to see the projects!
This course covers topics related to Internet marketing applications
(electronic commerce). The topics include: data storage and retrieval (relational databases, SQL), web technology (client/server model, Java inteface to relational databases), and web security (cryptography and ciphers, secure internet protocols, digital certificates, digital signatures, and digital envelopes, firewalls). A core component of
the course is a semester-long project on designing, implementing, and testing a web site for a virtual business. The site serves as an interface to a database of products and allows to fill order forms and "buy" products with virtual "money".
Elena Machkasova (please call me Elena)
Office: SCI E127, Phone: X3172
E-mail: emachkas@wellesley.edu
Office hours: Tue. 4:30-5:30pm, Thu. 10am-12noon, Fri. 3:30-4:30pm,
or by appointment.
The easiest way for you to contact me is by e-mail. I read and answer my e-mail regularly.
Lectures Tue., Fri. 1:30-2:40pm, SCI E111
There will be two kinds of assignments in the class. Please read carefully about policies for each kind, note that these policies are quite different!
- Problem Sets.There will be about 5 problem sets given out throughtout the course.
These problem sets are for individual work (as defined in the section Collaboration policy below). They will have programming exercises (mostly in the beginning of the course) and pen-and-pencil problems.
Problem sets are due in class at the beginning of a lecture on the due date. Solutions for some or all problems in a problem set may be discussed in class on the due date. No late submissions are accepted for problem sets.
- Project Assignments. A large part of the course is a project which is done in groups. The project consists of 5 assignments. Project assignments are due at 6pm on the due date at Elena's office (E127). Late assignments will be accepted with 20% credit loss for each 24 hours they are late.
Each assignment will be graded for the entire group working on the project. However, you need to specify contribution of each group member to the assignment (for more on how to submit project assignments see the project page). An individual grade for project assignments for each group member may be determined in cases when participation throughout the semester was significantly uneven for different group members (see Project grades ).
To submit a late assignment, please slide it under my office door. Please write down the date and and time of the submission on the first page, without such a note I will assume that it has been submitted at the time when I have found it.
Even though late project assignments are accepted, I strongly discourage you from submitting assignments late. Assignments follow one another, so finishing one assignment late makes you late on starting the next one, which means that you are more likely to be late with the next one, and so on... It is much more to your benefit so submit a not-quite-finished assignment for a partial credit and start early on the next one.
In exceptional cases (illness, family emergency, etc.) an extension may be given on assignments, provided you discuss the situation with me before the assignment is due or, in extreme cases, as soon as it becomes possible for you to contact me. Please also make sure to get in touch with your project group members and discuss the situation.
Please keep in mind that if one member of a project group is sick, the other ones have to finish the project assignment to the best of their ability and submit it on time, unless an extension has been arranged in advance.
Projects are done in groups of 3-4 students. As a general policy, all members of a project group get the same grade for each piece of work related to the project (s.a. a project assignment or a presentation). However, if the contribution of a person is significantly different from the contribution of others in the group throughout the semester, grades based on individual work may be given. This may happen in one of three cases:
- A student in a group has been sick or for some other reason was not able to patricipate in the work, or has dropped the class. In this case grades will be given to each of the students in the group based on their individual work and ability to participate.
- A student feels that the project grades do not adequately reflect her individual work or work of another student in the group.
- I feel from observing a group's work and reading the assignment reports that contributions seem to be uneven.
In each of these cases I will talk to each student in the group to discuss a possibility of giving individual grades. This decision will be made in the end of the semester, since it is based on overall work on the project. To make it possible to judge individual contribution of each student, it is required that you specify contribution of each team member in every project assignment.
Please
discuss a fair "division of labor" with the members of your group in the very beginning and throughout the semester. The best way of organizing your work is for each of you to contribute equally to each assignment. If it happens so that one of you did more than another one on one assignment, try to correct the "inbalance" on the next assignment.
If you feel that the amount of work is not balanced in your group, please talk to your teammates. If it does not seem to help, please talk to me, and I'll try to work out a solution.
The course has two exams:
- Midterm exam on Friday, March 29 in class. Please mark your calendars, this date is fixed and will not change! Covers material of the first half of the semester, including lecture on March 15 (right before the spring break).
- Final exam is self-scheduled during regular exam period. Covers material of the entire course, with some preference on what has been covered after the midterm.
Both exams are open-notes.
The grade in the course is computed as follows:
| Project: |
|
| Project assignments |
30% |
| End result and presentation |
20% |
| Exams: |
|
| Midterm exam |
15% |
| Final exam |
20% |
| Problem sets: |
15% |
| Total: |
100% |
Each problem set and each project assignment will be counted according to its grade point value.
We believe that collaboration fosters a healthy and enjoyable
educational environment. For this reason, we encourage you to talk
with other students about the course and to form study groups. Unless
otherwise instructed, feel free to discuss assignments with other
students and exchange ideas about how to solve the problems. However,
there is a thin line between collaboration and plagiarizing the work
of others. Unless otherwise instructed, you must compose your own
solution to each problem set.
In particular, when working on individual assignments, while you may discuss
strategies for approaching the programming assignments with your
classmates and may receive general debugging advice from them, you
are required to write all of your own code. Furthermore, you
should never look at another student's code. In general, it is
unacceptable (1) to write a program together and turn in two
copies of the same program, (2) to copy code written by your
classmates, or (3) to read another student's code. However, it is OK
to borrow code from the textbooks, from material discussed in class,
and from other sources as long as you give proper credit.
In keeping with the standards of the scientific community, you
must give credit where credit is due. If you make use of an idea
that was developed by (or jointly with) others, please reference them
appropriately in your work, e.g., if person X gets a key idea
for solving a problem from person Y, person X's
solution should begin with a note that says "I worked with Y
on this problem" and should say "The main idea (due to Y) is
...'' in the appropriate places. It is unacceptable for
students to work together but not to acknowledge each other in their
write-ups.
When working on a project, you may, of course, work together on program code
with members of your project group, but the collaboration standards above apply to all of your classmates who are not in your project group.
Lecture notes will be posted on the lecture notes page. While I'll try to post notes in advance, sometimes I may edit and update them right until the time of the lecture, so please make sure that you have the latest version for preparing for an exam. If I change notes after the lecture, I'll send an announcement to the class conference.
The conference for the class is called CS349-S02. All announcements for the class are posted in the subconference CS349-S02 Announcements. It is your responsibility to read this conference on a regular basis.
There are two conferences set up for questions and answers:
CS349-S02 Q&A lectures for questions related to the lecture material, and
CS349-S02 Q&A Java for questions related to programming assignments.
You are also strongly encouraged to read these conferences and to post there, not only your questions, but also your answers to other's questions. This material of the course, and especially the course project, are entirely new to Wellesley curriculum, so it is hard for me to anticipate in advance what problems you may encounter in working on the project or studying for the exam, and it may take a while for me to answer every single question on the conference. Your own input in solving these problems, finding references for material that answers questions, and so on, is crucial for making this course a successful learning experience for you.
The conference CS349-S02 Talk is for students in the class to talk to each other about orgainizational issues, s.a. choosing partners for a project group, setting up study groups for exams, etc. I will not be reading this conference on a regular basis, though I may glance there occasionally.
Tons of information on the material of the course is available online. The page documentation has a lot of links that you will, hopefully, find very helpful. Some of these links have in turn links to other good sources of information. I will be adding more material to this page as the course progresses.
If you find a good link on any subject related to the course, please let every one know about it (in class or via the FirstClass conference), I'll add it to the documentation page.
Your feedback for this course is very welcome! Please let me know all your suggestions and concerns. I am always happy to discuss any issue related to the course, personally or by e-mail. In addition to this you can submit your feedback via an anonymous form. This form will send me your feedback without specifying whom is it from. The access word for this form will be announced in class. The purpose of the access word is to make sure that only students in this class use the form.
Students with Special Needs
If you have any disabilities (including "hidden" ones, like
learning disabilities), you are encouraged to meet with an instructor
to discuss accommodations that may be helpful to you.
This page has been created and is maintained by Elena Machkasova
Comments and suggestions are welcome at emachkas@wellesley.edu
Spring Semester 2002