Conveying Computing Highlights (PS8 submissions)
Final Exam Comments: [PDF]
Course Evaluation Report: [PDF]

Notes: [PDF]
Final Exam: [PDF] [Word Template]

Thanks to everyone for a great semester!

For Option J, just create a zip file of your aazda/src/aazda directory that includes all the files you edited and your answers at the top level (not in a subdirectory). Submit this using the Alonzo-bot server.

For Option C/W, submit your artifact by posting a comment to this post. Your comment should include:

1. a full list of your team (normal names, not email IDs)
2. a description of your target audience
3. the actual artifact, or a link to it. If it is not possible to post your actual artifact (e.g., it uses a medium such as cake that cannot be easily transmitted over HTTP), you should instead post a description of your artifact (including pictures is usually a good idea).
4. if necessary, a poetic license statement. If there is anything in your artifact that you are aware is not completely correct technically, you may include a statement explaining where you took poetic license.

Updates:

Both options are due by 7:59pm on Monday. If you have something you want to turn in on paper, you can do that in class Monday, but there is no need to turn anything in on paper for either option.

For the comments, you can only post plain text with a few html tags and links. Since most of you will want to post a more complex document like a PDF file, the way to do that is to use a link. A link is:

<a href="URL">label for the link</a>

The URL is the location where your artifact is posted. You can post your file at http://people.virginia.edu/UVa ID/file by copying it into your public_html directory. There are also lots of free external sites that you can use for posting such as YouTube and Vimeo (for movies), Flickr (for pictures), SlideShare (for sharing PowerPoint presentations), Scribd (for PDF documents), Google Docs (for sharing other kinds of documents), and Google Sites (for creating web pages). (Sadly, I do not yet know of any external site for sharing cakes, but hopefully someone is working on this!) The advantage of using one of the commercial sites instead of your UVa account, is that unlike the UVa account, the commercial site will continue to work even after you graduate. The disadvantage of the commercial site, is that its a commercial site and may put advertisements, etc. around your work.

I would encourage you to learn some way to post your materials on the web, but if you aren't able to figure out a good way to post your artifact yourself, the other option is to email it to me.

There is still some more time available for presentations in class Monday, so the deadline for requesting to do a presentation is extended until 1pm Sunday (or when no more time is available). It is not required to do a presentation, but I do hope that teams that have produced something interesting will want to share it with the rest of the class.

Notes: [PDF]

Jonathan Burket, GuardRails: A (Nearly) Painless Solution to Web Application Security [PPTX] [GuardRails Website]

Virginia Smith, Big Data, Bees, and Buildings [Prezi Presentation]

Peter Chapman, Secure Computation on Mobile Devices [PPTX] [MightBeEvil.com]

Exam 2 Solutions: [PDF]

Class 39: Slides [PPTX]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal. 1989.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Our main goal is to improve the quality of web search engines. In 1994, some people believed that a complete search index would make it possible to find anything easily. According to Best of the Web 1994 — Navigators, “The best navigation service should make it easy to find almost anything on the Web (once all the data is entered).” However, the Web of 1997 is quite different. Anyone who has used a search engine recently, can readily testify that the completeness of the index is not the only factor in the quality of search results. “Junk results” often wash out any results that a user is interested in. In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own search page in response to its name in the top ten results). One of the main causes of this problem is that the number of documents in the indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude, but the user’s ability to look at documents has not. People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results. Because of this, as the collection size grows, we need tools that have very high precision (number of relevant documents returned, say in the top tens of results). Indeed, we want our notion of “relevant” to only include the very best documents since there may be tens of thousands of slightly relevant documents.