Syllabus

Lecture and section information

INFO 1998, Spring 2024

Course Email: cds.info1998@gmail.com

Lecture time: Wednesdays, 4:30-5:30 PM

Lecture location: Hollister B14

Staff and office hours

Office hours are listed on the home page.

If none of these office hours fit into your schedule, please post your questions to ED and a TA will respond in a timely manner.

Course description

The goal of this course is to provide you with a high-level exposure to a wide range of Data Science techniques and Machine Learning models, for the purpose of enabling you to solve real problems with machine learning. The course covers getting set up, manipulating and visualizing large datasets, building supervised and unsupervised machine learning models, and a discussion about the various application of these methods in the real world. If you have religiously followed the course throughout the semester, you should expect to have a high-level and intuitive understanding of how data problems could be tackled. You can apply this quick, implementation-oriented toolkit you develop yourself to a variety of fields and problems.

If you are interested in a solid mathematical foundation for data science and machine learning, this class is not sufficient in itself. This course, however, should serve as a head start for you.

Prerequisites

No prerequisites; Basic Python experience (at the level of CS 1110) is encouraged.

Course technologies

Class material

Class material will be posted on our course website, including the assignments, lecture slides, notes, and demos.

We will use CMS for assignment / project submissions and feedbacks.

Course work

Weekly assignments

One assignment will be assigned at the end of lecture each week, due 11:59pm the next Wednesday. You may skip up to one assignment throughout the semester.

Final Group Project

The final group project is meant to be a culmination of all the knowledge and techniques you acquired during the semester. We will be working on it throughout the course, with a mid-semester check in helping to keep you on track. This is your chance to showcase how much you’ve learned!

Feedback and Grade Postings

We will be providing you with feedback on the Cornell University Course Management System (CMS). We will grade your work within 8 days of the due date.

Grading

This is a 1-credit S/U class. In order to get a Satisfactory (S) grade, you will need at least 70%.

There are two components to grading:

This is a student-run course, so we understand how stressful classes can get. Above all, we want you to enjoy learning and applying the course content. So if you are concerned about passing this class, or have any reasonable cases to make for deadline extensions, please reach out the course manager or post a private note on ED immediately. We would love to see you succeed, but can only help if you notify us in time.

Course policies

Attendance

Attendance is not required. However, we highly encourage you to attend lecture if you can. We discuss code relevant to the answers to the assigned assignments in class, and coming to lectures ensures at least a fairly high score on assignments.

Academic Integrity

All Cornell students are expected to follow the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity (http://cuinfo.cornell.edu/aic.cfm). Do not refer to notes from previous semesters or data science projects available online. Our instructors have caught these in the past and the penalty for plagiarism is an unsatisfactory (U) grade.