Welcome to 07-300: Research and Innovation in Computer Science!
This Fall course, 07-300, is the first part of a two-course sequence (07-300/07-400) designed to help prepare students to invent the future state-of-the-art in the field of computer science. The course is designed to be taken primarily during the Fall semester of the junior year for CS majors and it has two foci: (1) research in CS academia and industrial research labs, where dissemination of results often happens through peer-reviewed publications; (2) innovation in practice in the field of CS more broadly, where dissemination of results often happens through new products developed by start-ups and corporations.
In both cases, a key challenge is learning how to work successfully on open-ended problems. With open-ended problems, not only is the answer not known already, but the path to finding the answer is often unclear. In addition, formulating the right set of questions to guide the work may be just as important as finding ways to answer those questions.
07-300 is designed to prepare students for working on open-ended problems productively and successfully. Without assuming any prior research experience, the course: introduces students to the important things to know about how research and innovation work in the field of computer science; helps develop critical thinking skills when reading and critiquing research publications; and helps develop technical communication skills for computer scientists. Students will also match up with a faculty mentor for their research project to be performed in the Spring, put together a detailed plan of attack for that project, and start to get up to speed (including background reading, learning any tools or techniques to be used in the project, etc.).
The follow-up course in the Spring, 07-400 ("Research Practicum in Computer Science"), gives students hands-on experience working on the open-ended problem they identified in the previous Fall, during a semester-long research project.
For a number of reasons, computer scientists who are successful in advancing the state-of-the- art in our field must have strong communication skills (in addition to strong technical skills). For example, gaining the resources to conduct a high-impact project often involves persuading others to either support or join the effort. In addition, disseminating the results of a successful project (so that it really does have impact on our field) typically involves both writing and speaking. Hence technical communication skills will also be an important focus of this course. Note that this course can be used to satisfy the Technical Communications requirement for the CS major.
After taking this course, among others, students should be able to:
Class meets for lectures on Fridays, 11:00AM-12:20PM, in Baker Hall (BH) A53.
Recitations are Mondays (Porter Hall (PH) 226C) and Wednesdays (Wean Hall (WEH) 5316), 11:00AM-12:20PM. Half of the class will have recitation on Mondays and the other half on Wednesdays.
Grades are based on five homework assignments and class participation:
Each student has 5 late days that can be used throughout the semester. At most 2 days can be used for a single assignment. Late days cannot be used for oral presentations that are done during classes.
| Name | Office | Office Hours | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ruben Martins | rubenm AT andrew.cmu.edu | GHC 7129 | By appointment via email |
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Alejandro Cuevas Villalba | acuevasv AT andrew.cmu.edu |
| Aviral Agrawal | avirala AT andrew.cmu.edu |