CSCI 4800/5800: Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems

• Course number: CSCI 4800/5800
• Instructors: Tam Vu
• Email: Tam [dot] vu [at] ucdenver [dot] edu
• Class hours: Monday & Wednesday: 2:00pm - 3:15pm.
• Office hours: Monday & Wednesday: 4:00pm-5:30pm
• Class location: PC Lab - LW 840
• Prerequisites: Some background in computer network, some programing experience, a lot of time, and interest in mobile devices/systems
• Course Page: http://cse.ucdenver.edu/~tamvu/courses/fall2013/csci4800_5800.html
• Materials: No text book for the course. Materials will be in the form of research papers, slides, class notes, handouts.
• Grading:
  • Research paper presentation(s) - 20%
  • Participation in class discussions - 20%
  • Research paper summaries - 20%
  • Project - 40%

This course covers various aspects of mobile and ubiquitous systems to provide an in-depth understanding of principles, state-of-the-art solutions and challenges in design and implementation of such systems. The main topics include: human mobility, people-centric sensing using mobile devices, vehicular computing and networking, positioning systems, energy and computing offloading in mobile devices, and security and privacy in mobile computing. Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts in Operating Systems and Networks in this class.

I plan to cover 2 papers per week (in certain cases there will be only 1 paper depending on the number of attendees). Most papers are selected from top networking and mobile computing conferences. For each class, students are required to read 2 of the assigned papers and write reviews for them. Review should be emailed to the instructor before class starts. In addition, a printed copy of the review should be submitted in class. I will cover the majority of the topics through lectures on important concepts and presentations of related papers. The remaining classes will be comprised of student-led presentations and discussions. Each student will be required to present 1 paper in the entire semester. The most important component of the course (as you can see from grading structure) will be the final research project. Students are expected to do these projects in groups of 2 (preferably). I encourage you to think about the project problem early, discuss your ideas with me, read papers in the area, formulate your solution, and finally implement it.

Class schedule

Here is an informal set of guidelines that you should use as you review papers and prepare for the presentation in class. You can find the approximate timeframe for each section of your presentation. Note that there will be questions and discussion as you present the paper, so please use the timeframe as a guideline for the number of slides that you want to prepare.

• Summarize. (3-4 paragraphs for reviews / 15-20 minutes for presentations)
  • Problem. What problem does the paper address? Why is that an important problem ? Who would benefit if that problem is solved ?
  • Solution. What is the solution proposed by the paper? Does the solution address the problem in its entirety? If not, under what assumptions does the solution work? Are these assumptions reasonable?
  • Evaluation. What aspects of the system do you think should be evaluated ? Are those aspects considered in the evaluation ? What is the experimental testbed used? What experiments were performed? Details of experimental results. What aspects of the system were not evaluated/evaluated in an unsatisfactory way?
  • Related work. What other solutions have been proposed for the problem addressed by this paper? What is unique about this paper's approach? Why does this paper's approach improve upon prior approaches?
• Critique. (2 paragraphs for reviews / 10-15 minutes for presentations)
  • Pros. What did you like about the paper? Did you learn anything new (tricks, algorithms, testing tool, etc) from the paper that you can add to your toolbox for later use?
  • Cons. What didn't you like about the paper? If you thought the problem was cool, but the solution was not, how would you have solved the problem differently? If the experimental results section was lacking, what additional experiments would you have performed instead? Why do you think the authors did not perform these experiments?
• Extend. (2 paragraphs for reviews / 10-15 minutes for presentations)
  • Future work. What is the logical next step in extending this paper? What about longer-term/more ambitious extensions?
  • Wild and crazy ideas. Your wacky suggestions here!

Policies

• You are allowed to discuss the papers with colleagues, however, you have to write the reviews on your own.
• You can either make slides by yourself or use slides from other sources for your presentation. However, please acknowledge the source of slides, pictures, text, etc.


• For students with disabilities requesting accommondations, you will need to contact the Office of Disability Resources & Services (DRS) located in 2514 North Classroom Building, phone 303.556.3450, TTY 303.556.4766. Their staff will assist in determind reasonable accommondations as well as coordinating the approved accommodations.
• Note: This syllabus is subject to change. Changes, if any, will be announced in class. Students will be help responsilble for monitoring this course page for all changes.
Copyright © Tam Vu 2013