There are two types of assignments, corresponding to the two parts of this class: basic concept homeworks and team project. In addition to these assignments, students will also be required to (and graded on) participate in paper discussions, under different assigned roles, in the second part of the class, which is discussion driven.
There are three well-structured homeworks, resolved individually by each student to exercise and deepen their understanding of the basic concepts taught in the first part of the class. Collaboration and copying are disallowed and will be severely punished for these homeworks. The three homeworks are spread through the first half of the semester, with deadlines as follows:
Homework materials will be uploaded on courseworks (Files section) when a homework is released. The deadlines are firm and will not be changed due to their impact on the remainder of the class. However, there is a 48-hour grace period, accumulated over all homeworks, for which you will not be downgraded. Lateness is accounted for at hour granularity (i.e., 1 second late == 1 hour late). Once you reach 48 hours of lateness, the next homework to incur even a one-second delay will be graded as ZERO. Thus, the strong recommendation is to submit on time, even if with an only somewhat working homework.
There is one team-based, scientific project developed through the second half of the semester. The purpose of the project is to give students an opportunity to develop something bigger in a team, and to strengthen their understanding of the scientific process. The project must be related to privacy in big data and must follow the applied scientific process, specifically: it must articulate a hypothesis, develop a methodology for testing it, which must involve implementation and measurement of some software artifact; it then implements the artifact and evaluates the hypothesis on it by measuring specific metrics. Project milestones and updates are provided weekly in class and are graded. We provide a set of templates from which to instantiate projects, but teams can also choose their own.
The final presentation will be delivered during the final exam slot assigned by the Registrar for this class (see the schedule or deadlines pages).