This is the home page for COMPSCI 240. COMPSCI 250 is the undergraduate core course in probalistic reasoning and will deal with counting, probability, probabilistic reasoning, Markov processes, and information theory.
Instructor Contact Info:
David Mix Barrington, 210 Computer Science Building, 545-4329, private zoom number 459 532 6175, office hours for Summer 2023: TBA
The best way to contact me is by email. I will usually eventually answer email at barring@umass.edu, but not as quickly.
TA and UCA Contact Info:
This course is primarily intended for undergraduates in computer science and related majors such as mathematics or computer engineering. COMPSCI 186 or CICS 160 (programming using data structures) and MATH 132 (Calculus II) are prerequisites and are pretty strictly enforced.
The course is entirely online. There are two scheduled meeting times each will, on Mondays and Wednesday, from 7:00-8:30 pm EDT. On days when we have required discussion meetings, there will be an alternate discussion meeting at 10:00-11:30 am, primarily for the convenience of students based in Asia.
Lectures will be recorded on Echo360, with four or five lectures per week totaling typically 80-120 minutes per week. These will follow the textbook pretty closely. Monday class periods, and a few Wednesday class periods, will be optional "semilectures", reviewing the material from the lectures and offering a chance for interaction. These will be recorded on Echo360 as well. Most of the Wednesday periods will be required "discussions", where students will be presented a problem, divided into groups in breakout rooms, and asked to submit one response from each group. These will be coarsely graded (A for a complete solution, B for less than that).
The textbook is several chapters (6 and 10-13) of the current draft of my in-progress book, A Mathematical Foundation for Computer Science. This is available as an e-book from Kendall Hunt Publishing for $67. (Royalties to me for this book are donated to the UMass scholarship in my name.) Note that there are two "preliminary editions", one used for recent offerings of COMPSCI 250, and this one -- look for the one that says "CS 240".
The course is using the Moodle course management system and the Piazza system for student discussion. Basic information about the course will be on this site, and specifics of the course will be off of the Moodle main page once it is established.
Announcements (15 May 2023):
Last modified 20 May 2023