Professor:  Dr. Fred Thulin    http://pluto.ksi.edu/~fthulin/

Text:  Robert Floyd & Richard Beigel, The Language of Machines: An Introduction to Computability

Course requirements:  There will be four quizzes, a final exam, three research paper reviews and a course project.  There will be no makeup exams or quizzes.  These requirements will count the following approximate percentages toward the course grade:

quizzes:  30%    (May 28, June 11, June 25, July 9)

reviews:  25%    (Due June 18, July 2, July 16)

project:  10%    (Due July 23)

final exam:  35%    (July 30)

Grade cutoff points are A: 90%, B: 80%, C: 65%, D: 50%.
 

Academic Integrity:  It is expected that each student submit only his or her own work for credit in the course.  A violation may result in splitting a score, expulsion or a grade of F for all parties involved. See the handout Knowledge Systems Institute Policy on Academic Dishonesty.
 

Reviews:  Read a research article relevant to automata or formal languages from ACM Computing Surveys, Communications of the ACM, Journal of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, IEEE Computer, IEEE Software, IEEE Transactions on Computers, AT&T Bell Labs Technical Journal, IBM Systems Journal, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Theoretical Computer Science, ACM SIGPLAN proceedings, or any paper in the text's references.  Your review should be about one page long; three-fourths should summarize the paper and one fourth should be a critique.  The report should be written and spellchecked using a text editor or word processor (e.g. Word) and be introduced with a formal citation of the following form:

Sheperdson, J. C., The reduction of two-way automata to one-way automata, IBM Journal of Research, Vol. 3 (1959), pp. 198-200.
 

Course Project:  This will be assigned and discussed in class.