Course Schedule: Spring 2010

Three hours of lecture per week. This course looks at the quickly developing landscape of mobile applications. It focuses on Web-based mobile applications, and thus covers issues of Web service design (RESTful service design), mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian/S60, WebOS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry OS, BREW, JavaME/JavaFX, Flash Light), and the specific constraints and requirements of user interface design for limited devices. The course combines a conceptual overview, design issues, and practical development issues.

Two hours of lecture per week. Law is one of a number of policies that mediates the tension between free flow and restrictions on the flow of information. This course introduces students to copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases, licensing of information, consumer protection, liability for insecure systems and defective information, privacy, and national and international information policy.

Three hours of lecture per week. User interface design and human-computer interaction. Examination of alternative design. Tools and methods for design and development. Human- computer interaction. Methods for measuring and evaluating interface quality.

This course covers the design, prototyping, and evaluation of user interfaces to computers which is often called Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It is loosely based on course CS1 described in the ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction (Association for Computing Machinery, 1992).

HCI covers many topics including:

1. Human capabilities (e.g., visual and auditory perception, memory, mental models, and interface metaphors);
2. Interface technology (e.g., input and output devices, interaction styles, and common interface paradigms); and,
3. Interface design methods (e.g., user-centered design, prototyping, and design principles and rules), and interface evaluation (e.g., software logging, user observation, benchmarks and experiments).

This material is covered through lectures, reading, discussions, homework assignments, and a course project. This course differs from CS 160 primarily in two ways:

1. There is an emphasis on interfaces for information technology applications; and,
2. There is less emphasis on programming and system development, although some simple prototyping (for example, in visual basic or using JAVA GUI development tools) may be required. (CS 160 has a big programming project.)

Three hours of lecture per week.
Prerequisites: Graduate standing.

As it's generally used, "information" is a collection of notions, rather than a single coherent concept. In this course, we'll examine conceptions of information based in information theory, philosophy, social science, economics, and history. Issues include: How compatible are these conceptions; can we talk about "information" in the abstract? What work do these various notions play in discussions of literacy, intellectual property, advertising, and the political process? And where does this leave "information studies" and "the information society"?

Three hours of lecture per week. The emergence of global digital networks, such as the Internet, and digital technologies that enhance human abilities to access, store, manipulate, and transmit vast amounts of information has brought with it a host of new legal issues that lawyers preparing to practice in the 21st century will need to understand and address. Although many are trying to "map" existing legal concepts onto problems arising in cyberspace, it is becoming increasingly evident that this strategy sometimes doesn't work. In some cases, it is necessary to go back to first principles to understand how to accomplish the purposes of existing law in digital networked environments. The course will explore specific problems in applying law to cyberspace in areas such as intellectual property, privacy, content control, and the bounds of jurisdiction. Students with familiarity with the Internet and its resources or with backgrounds in some of the substantive fields explored in this course are especially welcome, but there are no formal prerequisites. Grades for the course will be based either on a series of short papers or on a supervised term paper.

Note: This course is cross-listed with Law 276.1.

Standards and practices for organization and description of bibliographic, textual, and non-textual collections. Design, selection, maintenance and evaluation of cataloging, classification, indexing and thesaurus systems for specific settings. Codes, formats, and standards for representation and transfer of data.

A continuation and expansion of the introductory core course 202. Organization of Information with emphasis on organization of and access to textual and non-textual materials in paper-based and digital collections. A project-oriented course designed to provide theoretical foundations for current practices and for exploration of new methodologies for effective retrieval of information content. Emphasis on implementation and evaluation of organization and retrieval systems. Designed for Master's students expecting to manage paper-based and digital collections of information resources. Includes application of standard cataloging rules and indexing methods.

Outline of Topics

1. Systems for organization of paper-based and digital bibliographic and textual collections of information.
   • Use and evaluation of classification systems, including those employed in the organization of bibliographic collections; organization of abstracting and indexing services.
   • Use and evaluation of standardized codes and formats for the organization and cataloging of textual and bibliographic collections.
   
   
2. Systems for organization of non-textual collections of information (objects, images, sound, numerical and digital formats).
   • Use and evaluation of systems.
   • Use and evaluation of standards.
   
   
3. Design and evaluation of collections management systems, including criteria for systems design.

This course offers a multidisciplinary inquiry into the technology, business, economics, and public-policy of computer networks and distributed applications. We will cover the technical foundations of computer networks, including: Internet architecture, network technologies and protocols (e.g., 802.*, TCP/IP, HTTP), routing algorithms and policies, network applications (e.g., p2p overlays, VoIP), emerging network technologies, and network security. Tightly integrated will be coverage on the business, economics and policy of networking, including: economic characteristics of networks, network industry structure and ISP competition, wireless spectrum auction, network neutrality, and incentive-centered design of networks and applications.

The lowering of transaction and coordination costs through the internet, and the distribution of productive capital in the form of the personal computer has occasioned the rise of a form of production based on the collaborative efforts of autonomous individuals interacting online, often called "peer production." In this interdisciplinary graduate course, open to advanced undergraduates, students will analyze and contribute to some self-selected phenomena of peer production. An instructor-led component will seek to increase understanding of the challenges presented by and to peer production by both communicating the history and theory of network-enabled commons-based peer production.  Students will further explore these issues through first-hand research or development experience contributing code, analyzing legal, policy, social, and managerial issues, evaluating user interfaces, or otherwise engaging directly with a peer production process. While open source and free software projects will receive significant attention, the course will seek to explore peer production in varied contexts and may include discussion of Wikipedia, crowd-sourced news aggregation sites, distributed computing projects, or other volunteer scientific or literary projects.

To accommodate the interests of students from multiple disciplines, the hands-on aspect of the course allows the student to choose from one of six tracks and to work alone or in a group:

• Computer Science: contribute code to an open source project or create a new project;
• Management: analyze a peer production community or communities to study management approaches that  succeed and fail;
  
• Law and Policy: analyze potential legal issues facing a peer production community, ask whether such communities face unique legal challenges, and propose potential solutions;
  
• Design: study the user interface design used by a peer-produced product, proposing improvements.
  
• Technical Writing: contribute to a peer production process such as Wikipedia or contribute documentation for an open source project;
  
• Social Science: analyze the social dynamics, motivating factors, or persistent trends in a peer production community or across communities.

The above are illustrative examples and students may propose their own projects. Students in each track will be evaluated on the basis of written case analyses, proposals, and lab reports detailing their research on and contributions to a peer production process. Students are also encouraged to form groups across tracks focusing on the same peer production process or processes in order to collectively study multiple facets of the same phenomena.

Two hours of seminar per week. One hour of lab per week (devoted to the student's selected project, though students should expect to spend between 45-60 hours total on their project over the course of the semester).

The seminar explores selected advanced topics relating to 'digital libraries' with special emphasis on:

• Access to networked resources
• Use of two or more resources in conjunction
• Combined use of two or more retrieval systems (e.g. use of pre- or post-processing to enhance the capabilities)
• The redesign of library services

It is expected that these issues will require attention to a number of questions about the nature of information retrieval processes, the feasibility of not-yet-conventional techniques, techniques of making different systems work together, social impact, and the reconsideration of past practices. More generally, the seminar is intended to provide a forum for advanced students in the School. Anyone interested in these topics is welcome to join in -- and to talk about their own work. This is a continuation of the previous Lynch/Buckland seminars.