Instructor: Monica Lam
TA:
T.J. Purtell
Room: Gates 100
Time: Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:00-12:15
CS 294S is a project course focusing on future online social and mobile computing systems. This class will explore hypotheses and build prototype systems and/or create experiments to study these hypotheses. Students are encouraged to develop their own hypotheses or collaborate in ongoing projects at the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory.
Here are some example hypotheses:
- Instead of a closed, proprietary system that owns the world's social graph and controls the applications that can be run, there will be an open platform. Users may choose different providers and still inter-operate; developers are free to innovate and compete without restrictions. While systems like Diaspora have received a lot of media attention, techniques that leverage existing email identities may have a better chance of adoption.
- NFC (Near-field-communication) on the phone will become widely adopted. By introducing open standards that support peer-to-peer social interactions using NFC across different mobile devices, consumers will enjoy a new form of fun social interactions that is unencumbered with central monitoring.
- Instead of having companies mine our data behind our back, there will be a new genre of software that mines our own personal data for OUR own benefit. For example, tools can automatically create groups based on our emails and photo tags.
- By asking members in a university or a corporation to use their real identities, many new social applications can be developed that promote worthwhile social interactions.
We invite students interested in data mining, HCI, programming languages, distributed systems, networking, and security to join this class. One of the major goals of this course is to provide students with the opportunity to do inter-disciplinary projects -- breakthroughs in one area often lead to breakthroughs in others.
Students are required to come to campus for this course as it is a project course. You can take this course multiple times for credit. CS 294S can be taken to fulfill the CS 194 requirement. Please sign up for CS 294W if you wish to fulfill your writing requirement as well.
