Special Topics at the Intersection of Social and Information Sciences
CS101A, Section 01
Fall 2011
Academic Integrity
This course will require you to present and build on many existing sources. Proper attribution of ideas, text, and paraphrased text is required, in both oral and written presentation.
Teaching
The instructor will offer a set of core course topics that will be taught by students in the class over the course of the semester. Each student must teach one session during the semester. Time allotted to these sessions will vary, but will generally be no more than 30 minutes. When it is your turn to teach, your responsibilities are:
- One class meeting before you are scheduled to teach, turn in an outline of your session.
Bring copies of the evaluation form to the session you teach, and allow time at the end of your session for your classmates to complete them. - Design and distribute a 5-minute pass/fail self-assessment for your classmates to complete. This should be designed help your classmates determine whether they retained the most important points of your presentation.
- Two classes after you teach, hand in a brief (one- to two-paragraph) self-assessment of your teaching session. This should be based in part on the results of the assessment you designed.
Reaction Papers
The reaction paper is an opportunity to read two (or more) related papers in depth, reflect on them, and explore opportunities to build on them. You may work in a group of up to three people. Together, you should choose and carefully read at least two papers not directly covered by the course. You should then (either together with your group members or individually) prepare a paper of 4-6 pages. Your paper should address the following:
- Briefly summarize the contributions of the papers, taking care to relate the papers to each other. Why are these contributions interesting or important?
- What are the weaknesses of the papers? How might they be addressed?
- What are the most promising directions for extensions and future work in the area studied by the papers? How have (or haven't) they been explored in subsequent work?
- Do some initial exploration of at least one of the possible directions for future work, and report on your successes and failures.
Project
The course project will involve substantial engagement with a current topic of research at the intersection of the social and information sciences. The topic and goals of your project are largely up to you. Projects may be undertaken in groups of up to three, and may be related to the work you did for the reaction paper (but need not be). You should strive to produce something novel, such as new algorithms, models, or theorems; new experimental results; or a new synthesis and presentation of existing results, providing novel insights or perspectives.
The project involves three deliverables:
- A two-page proposal describing related work and the intended topic and scope of the project
- The final write-up: a technical report of ten to twelve pages describing the problem you considered, related work, your approach, and your results
- An in-class presentation
Resources
Seminars and workshops:
- Email edith AT hss DOT caltech DOT edu to be added to the Social and Information Science Lab (SISL) mailing list, to get announcements for biweekly lunch talks (noon on Fridays)
- Register for and attend the
NEGT Workshop at Caltech.
November 3 & 4.
Surveys:
Conferences with mostly AGT papers:
- ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC): 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, etc.
- Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE): 2011, 2010, 2009, etc.
Good CS Theory Conferences with at least a few AGT papers per year: