General Information

Class The class meets on Tuesdays and Fridays from 9:50am to 11:30am, starting September 10 and ending on December 08.

Location The course will take place in WVH 166. The organizational meeting will take place in WVH 166. If possible, the class will be run in this room. ~~If not, we will use the assigned location (Ryder Hall 433, 24 on this map).~~

Grades PhD students don't go to school to get grades. Try again.

Weekly Homework Assignment The weekly assignments will serve to reinforce the technical material. Some problems will ask you to solve paper and pencil problems; for others you will use the PLT Redex modeling environment, which comes with the Racket programming language; and for yet others, you will program in your favorite programming language.

Mini-Project In order to integrate what you have learned during the semester, you will integrate everything in a mini-project during the second half of the semester. The project should be your choice. Collect project ideas during the first six weeks of the course. By week six, you should be prepared to turn in a one-page memo on your project.

Here are some general suggestions on how/where to look for a Mini-Project:

an extension of a weekly homework assignment with a novel construct
the implementation of a semantics as an machine/interpreter (or vice versa)
turning a model from a paper into a Redex model
the development of a semantics for a language construct in a paper
the design and implementation of a special-purpose language (dsl)

If you are interested in programming language research, pick an ambitious goal; otherwise, learn to manage a research-y project. Details will be provided during the semester.

You will present the results of your Mini-Project during the lecture time of the last (two) weeks of the semester. Your presentation should be an extension of your memo with your results translated into an oral format. You have 30 minutes for your presentation, 15 minutes per student. You will answer questions for around 10 minutes. This is similar to the common conference presentation constraint.

Work You will work in pairs for the weekly assignments and the mini-project. The pairings will change over the course of the semester. For the mini-project, you will (probably) solve the problems on your own; your partner will serve as a sounding board. PhD research isn't about individual work only; you must learn to collaborate with others.

Exams We may have some. Perhaps not. See grades above.

Grades Okay, okay. We will assign grades because some people will never understand that a PhD is all about "wanting to learn". New: To a first approximation, the grades will be based on the results of the initial quiz and some 10 weekly assignment sets, each of which also counts for 5% of the final grade. The rest of the grade (approximately 40%) is based the pieces of the mini-project and their timely completion. If an exam is called for, the mini-project will count for less.