General Information

Instructor: Xiaorui Sun
Office hours: Thursday 11am-1pm at SEO 1241 or Blackboard
Instructional assistants: Dong Cao (office hour: 10am-12pm Monday), Chunyu Miao (office hour: 3pm-5pm Friday)
Classroom: LC C1
Time: Tue/Thu 2pm-3:15pm.
Course website (this page): http://www.cs.uic.edu/~xiaorui/cs401
Textbook: Algorithm Design by Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos, Addison-Wesley, 2006.

Prerequisites

List of Topics

• Introduction
• Basics of Algorithm Analysis
• Graphs
• Greedy Algorithms
• Divide and Conquer
• Dynamic Programming
• Network Flow
• NP and Computational Intractability

Lecture Slides

Grading

• Homework (45% of grade).
• Midterm exam (20% of grade). Details TBA.
• Final exam (30% of grade). Details TBA.
• Participation (5% of grade).

Homework

There will be five homework, two writing homework and three programming homework. The problem sets will be posted here.

Homework policy:

• Most of the problems ask you to either design an efficient algorithm for a specific problem, prove or disprove the correctness of a given algorithm, or to analyze the complexity of a given algorithm. Most of the problems require one or two key ideas. Be concise when writing up the solutions, but make sure to give enough details to clearly present those key ideas. Learn to mathematically reason about algorithms, and learn from the writing style of the textbook how to rigorously and succinctly describe an algorithm. Understandability will be an important factor considered in grading. You are discouraged from writing up long answers which you suspect are incorrect, in the hopes of picking up a point or two. You will get no point by doing this, and will receive a warning for the first violation. Any subsequent violation will be penalized by 10% off the whole set, due to the waste of TA time.
• Homework grade will be penalized at a rate of 10% of the initial grade per late day (five minutes late for one problem counts as one late day for the entire set), thus a problem set which is four days late would receive 60% of the points that it would have received had it been turned in on time. For any exceptions, you must have your undergraduate advisor (for undergrads) or your graduate advisor (for graduate students) contact me. Some problems will be challenging; you are advised to start the problem sets early.

• The homework submitted must be written by yourself independently, without looking at anybody else's solutions. You may discuss the problems with fellow students taking the class, teaching assistants, and the instructor. If you collaborate, you must acknowledge clearly, at the beginning of each problem, the people you discussed with on that problem. You are expected to fully understand every single step of the solution, and must write up the solutions by yourself independently.

  Violation of any portion of this policy will result in a penalty to be assessed at the instructor's discretion. This may include receiving a zero grade for the assignment in question AND a failing grade for the whole course, even for the first infraction.

  More generally, students are expected to adhere to the Student Disciplinary policy of the Computer Science Department; this policy can be found in full here. Please contact the instructor with any questions.