Notable CS Courses

Spring 2014

CS185C sec 1 Big Data

MW 9:00 - 10:15 in MH222

This course will have a very practical focus on the techniques and tools for capturing, storing, processing and analyzing Big Data. Tools such as Hadoop and Splunk will be used on virtual environments in the cloud. There they will process and analyze, either on batch mode or on a real time basis big data that will range from web log files to twitter and other specialized data.

This is a hands-on course in which students are expected to work in teams to complete 2 real world projects, which are the main component of the grade. Guest lectures by current practitioners are expected.

Prerequisites:

CS 146 – Data Structures and Algorithms

CS 157A – Introduction to Data Base Management Systems

With a “C-“ grade or better in each, or instructor consent 

Instructor

Peter Zadrozny is a "retired" technology executive and author of several computer science books. He has been helping the department build a curriculum in Big Data and has offered the above course several times.

CS185C sec 2  (cross listed as CS286 sec 2) Quantum Computing

MW 12:00 - 1:15 in MH222

Your laptop computer stores a large number of bits, where each bit represents 0 or 1.  A computer with N bits has 2N states, and it is in exactly one state at any time.  The computer moves from one state to the next under control of a program.

A quantum computer has quantum bits, also called qubits.  A qubit represents 0 or 1 or a “quantum superposition” of those two values.  A quantum computer with N qubits can be in any of 2N states or in a superposition of up to 2N states, all at once!  By applying operations to its state, a quantum computer can effectively do up to 2N operations in parallel, resulting in exponentially faster solutions for certain problems (factoring integers is a famous example) compared to ordinary computers.  When N = 500, the number of parallel computations is greater than the number of particles in the universe.  Nobody has a 500-qubit quantum computer yet, but these fantastic possibilities have made quantum computing a hot area for research, funding, and even commercial development.  Lockheed Martin recently purchased D-Wave Systems, a startup company developing and producing quantum computers.

 In CS 185C / 286 we will explore quantum computation including

·         basic quantum mechanics

·         quantum gates and circuits

·         quantum  teleportation

·         quantum algorithms, including factoring and search

·         implementing qubits

Prerequisites

·         the course is designed to be as self-contained as possible

·         no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics is assumed

·         students should be comfortable with linear algebra (Ma 129A): complex numbers, vectors, matrices, inner products, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors.

·         students should know some basic computer science:  algorithms, running time analysis, big O notation.

Instructor

Thomas Howell is a computer professional who has taught many courses for the CS department.

CS185C sec 3 (cross listed as CS267) Machine Learning

MW 1:30 - 2:45 in MH225

 Making sense of and exploiting the mass amount of available data for decision making is a critical task for companies in many industries. This course covers the main theories as well as widely used technologies for data mining, focusing on simple and scalable solutions that are applicable to Big Data. You will go through the entire Big Data mining process, from data extraction, loading and processing to feature selection and applying machine learning models to various mining tasks.

This course combines theories with hands-on assignments in which students are expected to work in teams to complete real-world data analytics project(s) using open source technologies (Hadoop, HDFS, Mahout, MOA, Weka) and/or commercial solutions provided by IBM (BigInsights, SystemML).

The main course components are online videos, project work, discussions of project assignments in class and guest lecturers from professionals in the field. 

Prerequisites

Students should know about

·       Programming (CS046A or equivalent),

·       Programming languages (at least one of the following: C, C++, Java or Perl),

·       Data structures and algorithms (CS046B or equivalent). 

Instructor

Thanh Tran is a renowned scientist in the semantic search area with 10 years working experiences as software engineer (IBM, capgemini) and assistant professor (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Stanford University). He published seminal work in Semantic Search research and helped to establish an international Semantic Search community through technology benchmarking activities, tutorials and the series of workshops called SemSearch. His work is published in numerous top-tier journals and proceedings, earned prizes and a best paper award and led to successful industry collaboration with companies such as Yahoo! and IBM. He currently serves as assistant professor at San Jose State University and director of Graphinder, a technology start-up focusing on Big Data management & mining technologies for effective semantic search.

CS185C sec 5 Game Design Studio

TR 6:30 - 7:45 in MH222

Game Design Studio is the capstone course in Game Design. Inter-disciplinary teams will create a substantial project over the course of the semester and present it to the public. The class will cover game production and development with groups operating as small indie-game startups. Emphasis will be placed on rapid prototyping, iteration and refinement. Lectures focus on gaming, society, and recent directions in the indie-game movement, with occasional guest lecturers from professionals in the field.  Weekly activities include play-tests, prototyping and presentations. Game development will be done in Unity, or another platform with consent of instructor.

Prerequisites

A games related course in the department of computer science or art or instructor consent.

Instructor

John Pierre Bruneau is an internationally exhibiting game artist based in San Francisco. He holds a developer position at Innovation Games and has many years of experience teaching at San Jose State University as part of the Learning and Games Initiative. Bruneau cofounded Ars Virtua, The Third Faction, and the San Jose State Game Developers Club. He sees games as the epicenter of discipline convergence and the key to the future of education.

CS108 Game Studies

MW, 6 – 715 in ?

Introduction to the systems, design, history, and cultural analysis of games with emphasis on development, technological literacy, markets and impact on society. In this course we shall read about, write about, play and design traditional paper based and video games.

Prerequisites

None, I believe

Instructor

James Morgan is a lecturer in the Art Department and faculty liaison for the Game Dev club.

Other interesting courses

CS108 (see above)

CS116B advanced graphics (recommended for gamers)
CS134 Game Programming

CS161 Advanced Software Engineering

CS167B This is IBM's DB2/System Z course that can substitute for CS157B (I think). There is a high demand for DB2/Z admins.

CS155 Algorithms

CS159 Multi-core processors

CS180I Internship (always a good idea)