Assignments
Who is Randy Pausch?
Randy
Pausch was a professor of design and human-computer interaction at Carnegie
Mellon University.
Randy
was mostly known for his #1 best selling book “The Last
Lecture” which expands on his speech at CMU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch#The_Last_Lecture
5 Things I liked
1.
He made me realize how much work I can get done if I managed my time
properly. I have always thought that I barely had time to do anything, but this
lecture has helped me realize that I have more time that I thought I did
2.
He did not just talk about how to work more efficiently and get more
things done, but he also emphasized the importance of alone time for creativity
and health.
3.
When he talked about procrastinating he did not give the usual points
of “don’t be lazy and do you work on time”. He gave a different perspective
that maybe you are procrastinating because you think you might fail, and that
resonated with me since I realized after listening to him that I sometimes
procrastinate because I think I can’t do something.
4.
When you are on vacation you shouldn’t worry about anything at all. It
is important to work on your mental health.
5.
It is very important to make sure you let people know you appreciate
their work. For example, physical thank you notes.
Professor Christos’
Questions:
What is a decision problem?
Finding out whether a problem that can be solved with
yes/no
What does it mean for a
decision problem to be decidable?
It means that it is possible to find a solution to the
problem
What is the class P? What is
the class NP?
Class P problems or Polynomial time problems are problems
that could be solved in polynomial time. NP class or non-deterministic
polynomial problems can only be verified in polynomial time but cannot be
resolved in polynomial time.
What is the intuitive meaning
of the “P versus NP” question”?
This is a question about whether or not P class is the
same as NP class, or if P class problems are only a subset of NP class
problems.
If you resolve the P versus
NP question, how much richer will you be?
The reward is $1,000,000
Professor Riley’s Questions:
Who discovered the attack?
How long has it been going on?
Security researchers at Samsung discovered the attack.
They claim that it has been going on for years while Apple claims that it has
only been going on for months
Who orchestrated the attacks?
How do we know?
While it wasn’t confirmed who orchestrated the attack,
people believe it was the Chinese government because of the targets being
Chinese muslims in China.
What did the attack allow the
attackers to do to a victim’s phone?
It allowed them root access to the iPhone which then
allowed them to spy on messages and the media saved on the phone
On a technical level, what
did the attack do? How did it do it?
The attacker baited victims into clicking a link which
allowed the attacker to take full control of safari on the iPhone, which then
allowed them to gain back door access to the root of the phone.
Why were the security flaws
not patched earlier?
They weren’t patched earlier because the general public and
Apple’s security team were not aware of the attacks
Sources:
https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/01/china-iphone-attack-uyghur-muslims/
Professor Hammoud’s
talk:
Why and what is cloud
computing?
Cloud computing is having access to infrastructure like
storage over the internet instead of having physical parts running the machine.
Is cloud computing new
technology? In other words, what is unique about cloud computing?
Cloud computing is new. It is unique in the sense that it
makes physical infrastructure less desirable for a company because it allows
companies to use resources over the cloud which is cheaper.
What are the three major
cloud service models, and which service model would you use to run your simple
python code?
There is IaaS which is infrastructure, PaaS which is
platform and SaaS which is software. To run a simple python code you need
infrastructure so IaaS would be used.
What are the
economic/business model of cloud computing?
It is cheaper than the alternative which is having all
those resources built physically in a company.
Sources:
https://doublehorn.com/saas-paas-and-iaas-understanding/
https://www.salesforce.com/products/platform/best-practices/cloud-computing/
https://www.pcmag.com/article/256563/what-is-cloud-computing
Professor Giselle’s
questions:
What are programming languages for?
Programming
languages allow humans to communicate with machines and pass instructions to
allow the machine to carry out functions
How do we translate solutions to
computer programs? What are the limitations?
We translate solutions to computer programs
using programming languages, the limitations to this comes mostly from the
processing power the computer has
How many programming languages are
there? What does this number tell you?
>256
it tells me that there are many different ways to speak to a computer
sources:
https://dzone.com/articles/big-list-256-programming
https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/programming_language.html
https://www.computerscience.org/resources/computer-programming-languages/
Professor Gianni’s questions:
Can you give both an
operational and a philosophical definition of AI?
AI is an intelligent machine created to act and think like
a human. Philosophical: if the machine can think like a human and feel like a human
then what is the difference between it and a human.
Can you name at least
three different techniques or sub-fields of AI?
Machine learning, Neural networks and Natural language
processing
AI has been around for
70 years, why is it booming right now?
We now have the processing power to carry out large machine
learning operations using large databases.
Can you name at least
three application sectors where robots are being largely employed?
Manufacturing cars, bowling alley pin setter and factory
workers. This is because robots are more efficient than humans and they are cheaper
to maintain as they don’t require salaries, benefits etc.
Can you identify three
potential challenges for a wheeled autonomous robot that would perform a 24h
surveillance task in a large facility?
It would not be able to cover everything at once so people
can sneak around. If the robot malfunctions for any reason and there are no humans
around, then there will be no one to watch over the facility.
Sources:
cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/IAI/w2.pdf
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artificial-intelligence/
https://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/future-tech/9-jobs-overtaken-by-robots-11364003046052
Sample Course plan:
GitHub:
https://github.com/AbdullaRahimi
Hackerrank:
https://www.hackerrank.com/arahimi
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdulla-rahimi-164251193/
CV:
https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~arahimi/CV
Calendar: