Special Topics Course

With the increasing diversity and complexity of computers and their applications, the development of efficient, reliable software has become increasingly dependent on automatic support from compilers and other program analysis and translation tools.

This course covers advanced topics on information retrieval, web search, and related scalable information systems. The topics include search engines, classification, indexing and data serving, ranking and recommendation, user behavior analysis, privacy, and system support for large-scale online services/data processing.

This course will revolve around the following topics: (1) quantum attacks against classical cryptographic primitives, (2) new cryptographic tools using quantum tools and, (3) performing quantum computations securely. Prerequisites: (1) Basic familiarity with cryptographic and quantum concepts, (2) Mathematical maturity (ability to understand and debug proofs) and, (3) Solid background in linear algebra. Course evaluation: One or two assignments along with a research project.

This graduate course will cover topics in discrete mathematical methods and combinatorics with applications to the solution of problems in computer science. We will consider topics in classical combinatorial methods and algorithms for selected problems in Algorithmic graph theory, classes of trees, enumeration methods, Lagrange inversion, number theory and primality testing, dynamic and fractional programming, FFT, Markov chains and random generation.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to solver-aided reasoning for software with a bit focus on program synthesis: an emerging area that sits at the intersection of systems, programming languages, HCI, and artificial intelligence. The goal of program synthesis is to generate programs automatically from high-level, potentially informal and incomplete descriptions.

The course covers all aspects of cryptocurrencies, including distributed consensus, blockchains, smart contracts and applications. We will focus in detail on Bitcoin and Ethereum as case studies.

In recent years, we have witnessed the widespread usage of ML tools for various classification, detection, and control problems. More recently, we have witnessed the use of ML for various networking problems as well. However, operationalizing ML solutions for networked systems is more nuanced than simply calibrating existing tools, developed for other domains (image classification, NLP, etc.). More in-depth exploration to develop flexible, scalable, and generalizable ML-based networked systems.

In this course, we will examine upcoming user interface technologies that will impact how we interact with our devices and digital content in the future. These include: physiological interfaces (e.g., brain and body interfaces), wearable computing (e.g., devices both for reading and writing data to the user's body), multisensory and multimodal interactions in mixed, augmented and virtual realities (e.g., spatial audio, body movement), haptics (e.g., force feedback, sensing weight, feeling textures), and others. Programming experience in Python/C#/C++ is required.

This course will investigate the formal specification of programming languages, focusing on their semantics (the behavior of a program when it is executed) and type systems (providing a static guarantee about how a well-typed program will behave), and connecting the two via a formal proof of type system soundness (i.e., that the guarantee provided by a type system correctly describes program behavior according to the programming language semantics).

Recent breakthrough of "quantum supremacy" by Google has brought us one step closer to building quantum computers that pose a threat to secure systems being used in practice. The main goal of this course is to study the theory of post-quantum cryptographic systems -- those that are secure even if quantum computers come into existence. We will introduce different types of cryptographic schemes and show how to build them from mathematical assumptions that resist known quantum attacks.