Video 0-0: Welcome, teaching mode, overview, assessment, academic integity, Campuswire, prior knowledge survey

0:00 Module introduction

0:03 welcome to com526 in this first session I want to walk you through a bit of organizational matters and tell you a bit what the module is about so the goals goals for today I basically tell you a bit um what is going to be covered in this module and I also want this um no hard feelings that's that's a way for you to see if that module is what you thought it would be uh in the first two weeks it's still relatively easy to swap modules if they're not compulsory for your course

0:43 then more concretely uh what I want to cover today is how the module is run it's a lecture but I've tried to add a few things that make it scale well to large groups and make it scale well to diverse groups question

1:02 no that's from the last session I'll come to the attendance code um the attendance code is one of those bits that will that I'll do differently from um the normal mode is writing them on the boards uh I couldn't be bothered to do that so I found a different way I'll show you in a second and I want to tell you how the module is assessed

1:28 the slide after this will come to the attendance code if you're getting nervous I'm Sebastian um I'm happy for you to use my first name if I'm in my office then that's the place email is more reliable because that also works if I'm working from home I have a PhD student Ben Smith who will run tutorials with you so you can reach him here as well the main information main main hub for information around the module is the module website which is is here is the QR code is also linked on canvas and so forth should be it should be easy to find so whenever you have questions that you feel should be on the website there probably are on the website there's a few other things that I'll explain in more detail and I'll say I have sent you an announcement about some of them already I will use something called campus wire as a system for you to be in touch as a group and be in touch with us it's by and large a replacement for office hours because office hours always have the problem that I give an answer to one person and then nobody else hears it or I give different answers to different people campus wire is much more much more fair

2:44 in that sense we'll come back to that you have to sign up for this this is not something that the university is officially using in other modules although some some of my colleagues found it useful and picked it up so you'll have to just sign up on this and here you need this this pin which is not anywhere else other than the announcement and we'll use slido I'll come back to that in a minute very briefly on the module it's by and large a theoretical computer science module we'll talk about algorithms much more than we'll talk about software engineering or programming systems it'll be more about the abstract ideas behind it and the assessment reflects it a bit will do some more practical things in the continuous assessments but in the form of puzzles and the main the bulk of the mark comes from the exam which gives 60 percent and more details on all of that later any questions at this point

3:55 so let me start with slido because especially for a large group like this um it's very useful to do just as a side remark the enrollment for this module from last year has doubled actually more than doubled I think so some of the organizational things and room sizes were a bit at the capacity limits um but we'll work our way around it slider is an audience response system it's a website that you can use with your phones or laptops or other device and the main idea is to have little pulse in the lecture to wake you up so let's try that as well um

4:40 there's two things that we'll use one is the polls that I just mentioned to ask you things and then I can get some aggregate feedback from the class yeah you can also use it to send questions to me and I'll try to keep my phone in uh inside if people send questions I will see it either directly or shortly after sometimes I'll just delay answering them till the end of a section but that's a way for you to reach me during classes and all of that works from from remote as well

5:16 so let's have a play with this uh here's the question that I uh I had put up earlier so some of you have already signed up if you haven't please do that now so you can go to slido.com and then it asks for an event code which is the module code comp 526 and there's also the short link that I used to the website as you see you can just live uh see how people vote I'll use it for different types of questions either just get an opinion about something like in this case um the other thing we sometimes do is I'll throw in little understanding questions to see if something I just said Has sunk in because

6:09 I'll give you a minute to sign up for that I also want to use slido to distribute the attendance codes so I'll fire up a poll where you can copy the attendance code and then enter it into the into the timetabling app

6:32 but I don't want to change the question straight away some of the things in teaching have changed during the pandemic and people just kept using them I've used that before the pandemic so in a way it it was super useful during the pandemic to have a tool like this other than staring at the black screen and getting no feedback but I've used it before and I think it's it's useful for Life sessions just as much as for for anything online and you will hopefully not have any online lectures during this course but I'm sure some of you will have have had the questionable Joy of pandemic teaching

7:41 one of the challenges with Masters modules is It's tricky to know the exact enrollment until students actually arrive so my class list has 197 people which is reasonably close to 186 is anyone still trying to sign into slider or you all everyone who tried to manage to ha so I should have I should have stressed this earlier but you can still change it you'll have a little account on slido it's not a proper account but it has it keeps keeps a cookie and keeps keeps your answers uh locked with a certain name and email address I want to use that for giving you a participation Mark basically by just clicking something on slider you'll get five percent extra credit for mostly doing nothing you don't have to guess right it's all about just being part of the fun but for that to work I have to somehow attach your your participation to your name right and the way to do that is somehow address uh coupled it with your University email so if you haven't used your University email for the sign up with slido there's a um there's a round thing in the top right I think where you can change change your email

9:07 um preferably use the email version that is your user account that you also use to log into the computers that we have in the labs you also get an alias with your actual name I'll probably make make that work too but if you want to make my life easy then use the other one

9:29 all right so uh for this question two-thirds roughly I have not used stuff like this in in at least face-to-face lectures and the rest has good to know I'm sure you will find it easy to use uh here's the attendance code

9:54 in the normal sessions I will throw this up when we get started so uh you don't have to wait for me but I I thought I first want to welcome you before I throw numbers at you I'll just leave this up and you can um see it on on your devices

10:33 lots of murmurs are still busy with the attendance code as I said we have we have time right we have a two hour slot I don't intend to spend two hours talking so I no particular rush today at least

10:48 Attendance and tools

11:01 my take on the attendance taking is I'm I'd like to treat you all as grown-ups the grown-ups you are so forcing you to sit in class is not really uh something that goes well with my style of teaching however we have an obligation as a university for international students to check their visa conditions which state that you have to be an active student and that's defined in bumps on seats attendance of lectures that's a good part why we do the attendance tracking at MSC level um don't waste much time on it let's just do it it's useful for you to see when you attended other than that I won't I won't chase you harshly if you uh prefer to do something else doing class time and watch the recordings

12:06 for the rest of today I want to walk you through a few of these other things that will have that we'll have going alongside the lectures um and give you a bit of a taster of the uh of the content but to frame that a bit uh if you philosophical remarks Maybe no matter how you teach it's always useful to structure content so I tried my best to do that and I'm sure other lecturers do too

12:35 um I've been teaching for for a while in different formats in different countries and so on and I haven't seen anything more effective than synchronous lectures I'm stressing synchronous not face to face okay synchronous is just a simple way to make sure that you devote at least these three hours a week to our topic field of studies whereas if you're trying to watch video recordings I've done that myself for uh just for fun trying to learn about other topics and it's incredibly hard to keep motivated and stick to it to the point that almost nobody finishes Coursera courses and so on they're still great to have but uh you're spending time and money of your life to learn computer science in depth and I think the most effective way to make sure you do that is the synchronous teaching session that's why we're here um in terms of making that a bit interactive there's always a few students in a group of 200 who are confident speaking up in front of a room on the other hand we're a large room and so not everyone is so I've basically given up asking people for questions in class instead I'm I'm putting everything on slido if you want to ask questions there you can do anonymously if you prefer or you can

13:56 keep your name in and you can use campus wire if you're not the type of person who has the great question during class but at some other time so I'm trying to have several channels open where you can do that

14:12 and the last one is just a little psychology hack nobody can really stay focused for 90 minutes unless uh your your uh giving yourself wake up cues I'll have my coffee with me but that's not the only thing I'm standing here and I know you're watching me so I'll stay awake right but you're just sitting there comfortably in this way too warm lecture hall so after 10 minutes you'll probably drift away those off and you all have your laptops on which I'm sure they're all just showing slido but the point is waking up quickly in between is just very helpful it doesn't take much time but I think it's very effective so we'll try that

15:02 so the module consists of these different things we obviously have the lectures where we are now with the slider questions that I spent a lot of time talking about already we have campus wire stretching along this I'll say more about it in a minute in terms of Assessments apart from the final exam at the end which you will have to do there's a few class tests which are not actual class tests in the literal sense they're online quizzes and they're spread throughout the term these are just old exam questions remodeled as an online quiz and so you can you can practice on actual exam questions several times during the term it's an online quiz but it's timed so uh so yeah make it at least a little more challenging and don't give you uh all the resources that you may have available um and we'll have two bigger continuous assessment parts the programming puzzles and the last bit is uh tutorials I think I have an extra slide on this as well think of these as a second chance to hear some topics and a chance to practice on on some exercise problems uh working on stuff for yourself you don't really learn algorithms from listening to some some guy speaking on stage about them you have to get your

16:09 Course content and units

16:31 hands a bit dirty which means uh getting a a piece getting a pen and a piece of paper out in most cases is enough so not really dirty but you have to get into the habit of puzzle solving and problem solving to really digest what algorithms are about

16:56 the goals for the module are to give you on one side um a basic toolbox of algorithmic methods and techniques so things that computer scientists have invented over the last decades that have been used over and over in practice these are fairly fundamental things and um many of them already exist in libraries but uh you need to know roughly how they work in order to use them effectively and for those with their computer science undergrad degree some of that will be uh just recap but at least half of the room something like that is conversion Masters students so people who have done a non-computer science undergraduate degree and do a computer science Master well they are expected to catch up in this first semester much of what the undergrad degree would have taught so that will mean for for all those who haven't done a computer science undergrad degree a more intense first few weeks because you'll have to catch up quite a bit we'll trim it down and you're a bit if you teach this to First Years you have to go a bit slower you already have a bit more study skills but expect a bit higher workload in the first first half of the module and probably in other modules too so uh

18:15 it's understood that that's a bit of a harsh time but it's just not possible to squeeze it in without doing some effort so that's that's first part um I also want to go a little further than that and give you some more advanced algorithms and data structures uh where um things are a bit more recent they haven't been around for decades and it's a bit more tricky to dive through and some of them are also not so widely available in programs so you might find yourself in an industry role where you have to implement some of those if that's solving the task at hand uh a more subtle side effect is is the second point many of these foundational tools are just the vocabulary that computers computer science experts use in their jobs and so they expect that you uh you're able to use these vocabularies but confidently and and knowing what's behind it

19:24 a lot in computer science is about finding the right levels the right ways to abstract things abstraction is is the number one Technique we have to uh Team complexity and finding good names and good Concepts to build these abstractions is as much of The Craft and so algorithms are ultimately all about that and the Practical thing is is of course combined combined methods build new things out of them

19:57 so the actual content is split up in these in these 10 units which will spend roughly a week on each the week per unit is only true on average some are shorter some are longer uh we'll talk a bit about some mathematical techniques I mentioned it's it's a more theoretical module so we'll try to have some theorems and proofs in there but it's also not a math module I'll focus more on the on the idea part than on the formal writing down of proofs but we'll do a little bit of that uh just because it's it's an important part of Designing algorithms we'll talk a bit about how we model the things you have in front of you Computing devices in the general sense I'll catch you up on fundamental data structures that's the part that you will definitely have seen in some undergraduate CS module if you've done it I will talk about sorting and string matching these are also foundations and then we'll dive a bit deeper into um all things relating to text we'll look at how to compress text and a few more more recent things on that um a quick note on error correcting codes to transmit text but look a bit about on we look a bit on Parallel algorithms how to use the

21:19 multi-core machines we have we look at text indexing which is pre-processing a large text so that it can search quickly and the last unit traditionally has been a Christmas lecture on some more advanced topic that wasn't covered on the in the exam but is is kind of showing you a little bit this is where the actual research action is happening

21:48 any questions so far probably check slido right there's one question let me maybe uh take that at this point I don't think we need the attendance code still so check turn that off

22:20 so the question was um okay it's flashing back and forth uh whether what the exam questions are like uh we won't do much coding because some of you start with basically no background in programming so I'll treat I'll keep the assessments very basic on the coding side um think of the more the the continuous assessment is more like a puzzle solving the exam questions um are similar plus a bit of uh designing creative algorithms something of this type we'll get to our exam questions later in the course again and the tutorials and class tests I'll show you what the exam questions could look like

23:11 Q&A session

23:12 foreign okay Mouse is very slow uh programming languages will mostly use Python because that's what you're taught if you start on the conversion Masters you can use other languages the the content we'll talk about is mostly agnostic to the language right uh python is the main one and where I'll have examples on the slides there will be pythonic

23:49 I'd say that's the same the final exam is pen and paper exactly um it's not McQ it's a written exam although some questions are essentially uh solve this puzzle for me and then it's it's a relatively short answer but you you get to explain your your steps in the way

24:20 suggestions for a head start for non-cs students under non-cs undergrad students you all have some undergrad degree otherwise they don't let you in but yeah there's there's some material on the unit too about fundamental data structures and there's a few other book recommendations uh the problem is it's very broad like an undergrad degree in CS takes three years you're not gonna catch up everything but you also don't have to catch up everything at least not for uh for passing this module or um surviving the Masters so maybe a bit more targeted I'll come back to that

25:05 I like how you guys use slido so it seems to work I'll put the lecture slides on the module website there's subpages for the units I actually put the ones very close to the ones that I'm showing already on there it occasionally happens that I have a last minute flash of oh I could also talk about that maybe I I'll change it I definitely update them after lecture and as you may have seen I'm I'm drawing on the slides and sometimes I do a bit more than just putting a DOT so you get a PDF from that as well

25:45 they are not really open book exams um what I used to allow is bring one A4 sheet a cheat sheet a handwritten sheet of paper where you can take some some notes but it's not a book so uh the idea is the idea is to allow you to bring in something just to not make you uh feel you have to learn everything by heart but open book exam often means people just browse books and waste more time on this we've experimented with this in the past and um it often doesn't work to the advantage of students

26:30 um so we have several quizzes the ones on slido are just for information and I'm I'm not actually looking at the answers you give all I'll look at is whether you answered in so and so many of the polls we'll also have the quizzes on canvas for the class test what's officially called the class test these are these are assessed and you get a mark on it I'll come back to it actually on the slides

27:00 it's one A4 paper both sides hand written it must be your handwriting okay uh we'll mostly use canvas just for publishing the marks and for you to submit the continuous assessment so I'll update the module website not so much canvas I'm not a big fan of this login if you whenever you have to look up something on your module you have to log into canvas first oh come on no

27:33 no you cannot find the slides on canvas you can however find them on the website um okay we'll come to that for the class tests the way I set them up in the you're you're well ahead of all of it so uh the class tests I used to set them up that you have a practice version with the same type of question that you can do as often as you feel like and then the real one is timed and you can only do it once but you can get the same type of question practiced first so you see exactly what is the type of formats it's it's Auto marked so you have to type the format in the right way so you can use the practice to make sure you have that right and understood what type of question it will be and then the real one with accounts we have to do and you can just do it once

28:27 do we have to study all the units for the exams or are some units only for assignments uh nothing's only for assignments the unit 9 is only for fun

28:45 uh I don't know slider will mostly be used in class um I don't think Ben used it in the tutorials and other than that I don't know what to use it for think of slido for lectures and campus wire for outside of lectures they're filling similar roles but both are a bit more geared towards the two scenarios synchronous or asynchronous

29:12 Assessment breakdown

29:12 um well we'll come back to that all right uh well okay maybe I can say one thing I usually try to balance things so there will be different sections in the exam five sections and you have to do four out of them the best four are marked and each section has a more bookwork style question a question where you have to work on something but it's applying an algorithm for example that we've seen and the third is a little more creative you have to do something new or combine things in a new way is a bit abstract as this and well we'll we'll see more examples later in the semester

30:03 yeah that's the same as before right for specific topics there's uh some sources on the website uh maybe I should have shown the website uh so on the unit subpages on the module website there's sources and further reading for most of the units I don't have a textbook that covers the entire module a Cherry Picked from various places but I think all are available in the library in some form so you can you can go and grab the chapters from the library that that this is based on

30:39 can we get a hold of PhD students in your research group uh they try to run away but Ben is my PhD student one of them so you can try to grab him next week in the tutorials um if you have more if I misunderstood the question I'd maybe maybe ask again foreign yes you can write pseudocode in exams

31:08 yeah I like I like this chord is fine you know campus fire has a few features that are nice uh now it's likely that whatever feature I mentioned you'll point out our Discord can do that by now fair enough uh so canvas has a compass wire has Anonymous posts as opposed and and normal ones uh it has a few um features that look look a bit more like um like Reddit and the other is more of a chat room so I find it overall a bit more structured but yeah people love Discord I know

31:49 I like the session today or in total that depends a bit on you guys right so two hours today but I hope I won't speak for two hours um we'll have teaching so okay maybe I'll just point you to canvas so this is the time to switch over to the website

32:16 so um the module website is here that's what it looks like and it has a link to Canvas the front page of canvas what they call syllabus is publicly visible and it has this overview of the term

32:42 where it shows you the weeks how the uni calls weeks and then the Monday of that week how the rest of the world calls things with dates um there's one week where I'll be away and other than that it goes up until the Christmas break

33:00 and there's not really anything after the Christmas break apart from the exam so here that should be um basically the final overview of the exam I hope we won't have to move move things around all right

33:27 uh there were there's some there's you should all be on an all-student canvas course um is something that staff sometimes don't immediately get added to or so I I'm not always uh seeing exactly what you see uh but past papers there's a few past papers available through that online course centrally for for everyone uh that's where you should find this

33:55 um ah okay I click then it takes a second and then it reacts by that time I have clicked again and undo the um the programming puzzles might be called projects but there will be no group work um students tend to hate group work uh let's not get into that for too much

34:21 I suppose that means for the exam and the answer is yes you have to obey the rules otherwise you might get punished terminated like that's a harsh word maybe not uh ah I have no idea what the passing grade was last year uh uh well maybe I'll have to look it up and tell you another time

34:45 there would be three questions in each section and five sections on the exam where from the sections it's best four out of five and it'll be in January guys it's a long way to go

35:06 okay I think I covered that um there's a separate module if you're doing a conversion Master you will have a programming module that hopefully covers covers everything you need for that [Music] um tutorial okay if we ever get back to the slides I'll show you uh

35:33 I share the slides the first slide has Pence email obviously the algorithms weren't like a I'm biased no I mean in seriousness I don't know it depends what you want right uh depends on your course and so on uh each and every one of you has an academic advisor who you should have met during welcome week maybe it's even me for some of you uh you can you can ask them for such questions uh with the context they can give you a more intelligent answer

36:29 right okay if there's timetable clashes there really shouldn't be timetable clashes but sometimes it's inevitable uh as sad as it is to say it's probably more worthwhile going to the tutorials because all lectures are recorded and the tutorials typically are not uh of course you lose the fun of the life interaction

36:57 okay uh good question um I should probably know I don't know if the tutorial is some number two I think they are you're supposed to attend them another question is if if Ben is forced to do the attendance code checking that's the part I'm I'm not sure about but then again you grown up individuals me trying to treat you like grown-up individuals uh I'll leave it with that I've heard that before I don't know where this comes from keep keep guessing no I'm not but I've lived in Canada

37:49 all right shall we uh try to ah let me switch away quickly before yeah before you fire up new stuff yeah so the thing about researchers is it's it's pretty easy to Google them uh if they want to survive in Academia they usually have a website and um typically put a CV on there but yeah good research skills or good um accent tracking

38:26 right okay I think we covered much of what I'm what I what I prepared on this lights but not all of it so uh Dead Silence it starts it's about um marking time I said we have 60 from the exam and the rest is continuous assessment that's split up into programming puzzles each ten percent the combined class tests I talked a bit about that's the uh online quizzes that you'll do throughout the exam throughout the term that gives you another 15 percent and five percent is just for sitting here and clicking right uh that's the easy easy Mark to earn that's for participating in slido uh it doesn't matter if it's correct but you say if the answer has a correct uh if the question has a correct answer anyways

38:34 Academic integrity

39:17 and I think I explained what the class tests will look like as well so I'll try to do it very fair so it is timed you have 20 minutes to answer the the question and that's about how much time I think you need if you're a bit slow and careful um the point is I don't want you to uh open the question and then just Google the heck out of it or well we use other tools that didn't exist last year around this time

39:50 um I'll talk more about this in a second so it's timed but you have this practice version to see what it's like uh do I dare to look how's your life after retiring yeah I'm happy to swap salaries with Zlatan right any any other time all right uh questions on the on the assessments on them on the marking scheme

40:25 okay this is the unpleasant Parts but I want I want to say a few words about it academic Integrity is this notion very strong in British universities that you should you should show good academic practice in all your assessments now that term is not exactly self-explanatory the rules in the UK are are about the strictest I've seen um and there's a really strong notion of no no tolerance for violations against that so pay close attention there's nothing to be scared of but people are strict about it so uh try not to um let that work against you

41:12 the the short Common Sense version is this whenever you're assessed it must be your own work and if you use someone else's work you have to cite it and give an explicit source for that that's basically all and the rest is fleshing that out because sometimes the boundaries are a bit blurry and we'll have to talk a little bit about what that means for generative AI tools because some of the assessments are just made super boring through those it doesn't affect algorithms as much um but a little bit and uh I want to say a few words about that the other important bit is for this module there's no group assessment so all your assessed work has to be your own work if you're working with someone else you have to acknowledge it and uh you can get in trouble even if someone steals your work and cut and copies it if that's fair or not it's not for me to decide but the rules are fairly strict so try try to avoid that uh okay let's um Maybe

42:22 let me skip this one because we've spent we've had a lot of fun on slider already I wanted to to collect a bit thoughts from you why do we do Assessments in the first place and there's many good answers you want to stick in a mark at the end of the scores on your on your degree but that's not the most not the not the most interesting part assessments are also a way to force you to show what you what you know and to practice and maybe this this last bit is something that you can try to keep in mind now I know things get stressful you have certain career goals you want to achieve certain marks and all I get that but try to not let that spoil the whole thing The Learning Experience of Assessments is equally important especially for the continuous assessment if you look at the percentage that you get for some of these assessments it's just not worth risking a lot or spoiling the learning for for that little part of the mark that's maybe the the gist there I wanted to say

43:32 uh there's there's various things different terms that are used in this context that I wanted to clarify so these are different things that you can do that are not considered good academic practice collusion is whenever students collaborate where it was not allowed and then submit this as their own work and the the interesting bit there is it doesn't really matter if uh um if if the rest of the group knows that you submitted this as your work so it's a fairly strong notion and similar copying means you copy from someone else someone else copies from you that's enough for the uh offense of copying to have happened plagiarism is a relative of that where you copy from some published Source not necessarily one of your fellow students other than that it's it's the same and all of these are considered inappropriate right let's be clear about that um

44:36 again the philosophy behind it is you're using someone else's brain power instead of your own and want to get assessed for that that's what we don't like now um

44:52 a few words on on generative Ai and all those tools like just to be clear I'm talking about chat GPT and also image generators like mid-journey and all the other stable diffusion and what else not uh GitHub co-pilot of course for coding assessments is very relevant won't help you very much for this module all of this is great like I love playing with this it's super exciting and who knows where it will lead us right so um I think it's it's generally a very exciting thing I don't want to Hype over hype it but it can do cool things and it would be stupid not to try things out but don't do it during the assessments the cost is high and you're losing something with it I mean first of all as I'm sure you know all the tools have their flaws and some of them seem intrinsic it's not that they'll be ironed out very soon uh they can still be super helpful but

45:49 there's a reason we still teach kids in Primary School uh mental arithmetic and so on even though calculators have been around for decades so why why do we do that uh If people could just use the calculator because we think we collectively all Educators think that skills in your brain are effective scaling generalizing using the AI term from the mental task of adding numbers to other things and that you only learn this by by practicing it so you're building up something that is making you an expert and that comes from doing things it comes from knowing learning new topics like sitting in a lecture but it also comes from doing things and that's exactly the problem if if you let some some AI system do the puzzles for you you don't do that practice and at least say we don't know what that means for you it probably means you get less of a learning outcome that's at least what everything points to

47:00 with this mindset the university has set out an entire separate policy just on generative AI where they tried to explain where in what sense are you allowed to use it and what is what is unacceptable and um It's relatively narrow but it's it's explicitly allowed that you use tools but you're only allowed to use it to prepare something to do background research say similar like you would use Wikipedia with the same drawbacks right you all know if you read something on Wikipedia it could be written by this one jerk in Texas that somehow got through all the edit Wars but most likely it's all right it's just it needs double checking sometimes same especially for all chat GPT answers and you're allowed to use it for proofreading but people restrict it to uh finding typos and grammar mistakes formulating text from bullet points would be beyond that in this according to our regulations and we'll we'll see if this is the last word spoken on this right it's new literally for last iteration of this module it wasn't relevant so it's it's maybe subject to change but that's what we have for this Academic Year I think and it would not be acceptable to use the tools and just pretend it's your output now um

48:22 it's okay sometimes to use the tools inside them for example okay I didn't pick up pick the example sometimes you want to say uh it's hard to imagine a useful example in algorithms to be honest but uh some common knowledge is often very crisply uh formulated by by a chat TPT answer and if you cite it with the prompt that might be a useful resource like if you cite a Wikipedia article that's also fine important is it has to be a citation you have to give the source and you have to mark it's not your thought it's coming from there all right

49:08 if this is um too short for you or if you want to check boundary cases there's two links with the Official Guidelines and also I want to point this out uh this is basically done by our library they have a few know-how courses one is on generative AI just showing a few basic things that probably many of you already know but maybe there's a few bits that that you don't it's new for everyone uh and they have a few other things they have a session on on time management skills which might be might be a few useful hints there too

49:52 I've seen your questions on slido but I want to get through this first uh that's still part of this uh academic Integrity points the way the question is intended so I'm I'm reporting this from some some research that educational researchers have done they have to ask students a bunch of questions about their personality and their life circumstances and so on and among other things they asked them self-report about whether they cheated in assessments and then they try to find some trade of these of these people that predicts whether or not they would cheat and so this question is getting at what what did they find is the most likely thing that students who did a often found were found also reporting to cheat all right

50:58 and I'll collect your answers a bit first so that you're not immediately influenced by what other people said all right we'll definitely have to work on our timing I guess uh

51:26 I'm slower than I wanted uh wanted to go let me show you uh it's a nice nice snapshot like lazy stood out very big at the first first time

51:58 definitely so I'm not I'm not talking about the causality right uh what they tried to find is is a thing that went together correlated with uh report self-reported cheating

52:17 all right I keep finished typing but um I mean there are many interesting things in there the number one reason that they that they found that students self-reported that correlated with this was I don't have time okay simple as that and shows here too there might be the correlation with lazy but that's not what the scientists found on closer look they said when students report they don't have time it's more likely that they are lacking the time management skills when you all have the same 24 hours a day obvious and you spend them in different ways um and you're all doing the same course or at least many of you are in the same course and some people cope others don't for many reasons but time management seems to be the thing that you can do something about

53:14 there's a video going into uh the research um now I want to point out again uh the article where our library people did their best to collect some time management skills I'll try to help you a bit in the assessments um but I still have to check if we can if we can get that set up on on canvas like this try to have an early submission that you get some part marks for but which is which is assessed in a very a simple blackwise sensible nonsensible way uh try to start early on all the assessments I can only say that to you and I hope you take it somewhere take it serious time management helps to avoid falling to the Trap that then leads to cheating which again is bad uh last word of warning it can get really bad so these are different categories of how academic misconduct might be classed if it's just a minor error where people think this was uh was not even on purpose nothing really happens but you can get a deduction in the mark if if you didn't properly cite something but there's no intention to deceive recognizable uh it might still not have harsh consequences but people might already decide to cap that assessment at the

54:39 pass mark which uh it can cost you a lot of percentages for a relatively small thing uh the more serious cases are C and below so C is the standard kind of cheating case where some student copied from someone else and that's just obvious from the submissions and so on if that happens for the first time you get a zero on that assessment but you have you have a mark on your record and it becomes a category D if after the warning that this has been has been detected and and found you do it again then it's category D and that means the zero on the entire module and you're only doing so many modules so that has an immediate knock-on effect for the final grade um there's some more serious offense that could even get you kicked out straight away without further questions uh that rarely happens but it's an option and what I want to point out is serious malpractice that sounds like you're you're committing a half half a crime but uh the official definition says serious malpractice is if you pay someone to do the coursework for you use some of the websites that offer this that's classed as e it could get you kicked out straight away like really that's serious don't do it

55:59 and people class it the same way if you take the entire assessment feed it to chat gbt and just take what comes out and submit it as your work same same kind of classification that's a very strict uh strict way to look at it it's not mine and but it's the one that will be followed so just don't do it okay um

56:26 you might question how do we find things uh there's there's software tools that that help with that and it's it's an arms race between generation tools and detection tools getting better uh I'm sure neither side is perfect but the simple cases are often found uh Ben will talk maybe about this for the tutorials last year was unfortunately quite a few cases so uh I promise to be a bit more clear in class just don't do it it's it's a pain for us to deal to deal with and you get yourself in trouble

57:05 foreign okay end of the end of the gloom and doom uh very quickly on the tutorials um we'll have a sheet published every Monday the first one is actually already out but you'll only cover it next week and we'll cover the material that this tutorial sheet is about this week and maybe uh yeah we should we should get it done on uh tomorrow on Friday

57:07 Tutorials and support

57:32 it has several problems for you to work on I mean you can look this up on the on the module website later it has some practice problems which often are old exam problems and sometimes some enhancement problems things that I think is uh that we thought are useful to think about even if they go beyond uh what would be uh asked in an exam the tutorials themselves are the one hour sessions in smaller groups that are scheduled throughout the week um and what happens there is basically um some you'll be taught in smaller groups about these problems and it's also a forum for discussion the problems themselves will publish some solution hints afterwards but I want to point out that again uh you get more out of this if you follow the suggested suggested course here but this is not something we check so this is uh up to you when the problems come out you should try as soon as we covered the material in class try to work out the solutions for these problems and write it down and since that is not assessed you're happy we're happy for you to do that in groups or in whatever uh in whatever scenario that's up to you but writing down your answers forces you

58:51 to be concrete and so try to make that a habit if you can somehow find the time this will be very rewarding and then in the next tutorial session uh you'll hear from Ben about the sample Solutions and you can discuss in the smaller groups you'll all be assigned a group on your timetable so you can check which one that is uh hopefully the that will have worked out so that everyone is in one of those groups

59:33 okay we have campus wire it's an online platform you can sign up for many of you have already done that there's basically two things we use in there there's what they call the class feed which is a bit like Reddit you can ask questions and people can answer you can ask Anonymous if you prefer it supports math and so on we'll have some posts explaining the details on campus wire itself uh basically that's that's the point where you can if you have some question from the lecture or the tutorials you can post it on campus wire and the idea is that other students can also answer as well as Ben and I and other helpers there's also a chat room that um we haven't used massively last year but that's for synchronous quick things if it's not covered on slido

1:00:29 right so you can ask public questions and others can join in to answer them and try to do that so what we'll do is whenever a question comes up I will not answer it immediately even if I'm sitting on my laptop working on the module I would not do that but rather leave a day or so for you to answer if it's something that's not urgent

1:00:56 because that teaches you much more the person that answers for someone else's question learns learns a lot in the process you can also ask private questions or posts uh with which just go to Ben and me if you feel this is a question about an assessment that might spoil some of it then that's a that's a opportunity for the private questions

1:01:26 I motivated a bit earlier by why Compass wire as opposed to standard office hours and the reason is just you can ask questions and I can give the same answer to everyone and so it's it's fairer that way it allows you to learn something by answering questions and you can do it anonymously if you feel if you feel frightened for whatever reason if you don't want to have your name sticking to the question you can do that

1:02:00 good almost almost done with that part um some word some words with a wink on the philosophy of the module it's not so much about random tinkering and uh sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't we don't know why I hope it's not too small it's more about like mathematics about the about the universal truths of algorithms and I smuggled in Practical algorithms because we'll focus on the kind of algorithms that have have been used in practice that are efficient in applications but will still be on the math teacher side in the sense of having a formal model of reality first make quantitative predictions and then maybe at the end validate that in experiments is maybe similar to other Natural Sciences in that sense physics also often makes a formal model of the world and then validates that they stay a bit in between where computer science goes further we're also engineering Solutions so uh unlike physics where you can't simply invent new laws of of nature we can we cannot invent laws of nature but we can invent algorithms almost the same

1:03:22 Final Q&A and survey

1:03:24 good uh there are a few questions on slido let me come back to those but there's something else I want to do with you before we run out of time

1:03:48 before the five percent participation mark um this is only for the slido pulse and there's no option I think to do the vote anonymous because it's always just the aggregate that we see so it's only about the pulse on slido the green questions on the slides that's what it's about

1:04:16 right if you happen to get the very same answer as a classmate uh I mean this if if there's a if there's a random chance for that happening we'll take that into account the cases I'm talking about from last year these are completely Beyond doubt is so obvious if if there's entire paragraphs literally identical including the typos right it's it's fairly blunt things I'm talking about so if if it's uh okay if it comes to the allegation of some misconduct there will be invest an investigation where we collect evidence and then we have an academic Integrity officer who takes these away from so it's not me investigating it because I'm maybe biased teaching the module so someone else looks at it collects the evidence and I think you you get a say in it if yeah you can appeal against the decision and you can make your point at that at that stage so if there's something like a the very unlikely case that really by pure chance it's very similar to some Source uh it should be it should be possible to root out at that point then we're mostly talking about fairly obvious things and uh I hope I hope we don't have to deal with them

1:05:35 um the way it's set up so this is part of canvas if you submit things you get a little report that tells you how much plagiarism the tool has found and the numbers sometimes don't mean much uh often if you put references in your submission the references are often exactly the same as other people referencing the same thing obviously we ignore all that so you get some report and you can look at it uh

1:06:03 so you should see if there's something fishy happening you can alert it to people if it's if it's just tools like grammarly that that only correct grammar I think is covered by this spell checking exemption the problem is that the borders get get unclear there now uh I think this is a question we'll we'll come back to but many of our assessments are not really essay questions I won't I won't really ask you to write essays in the sense of maybe some social sciences or Humanities subjects would do so I feel it's much less relevant and I'm happy for you to do spell checks nothing's more annoying than reading a text where there's lots of typos so it's overall a good thing

1:06:57 um not easily because it causes problems with timetabling but you can discuss with Ben if there's if the rooms have capacity and there's nothing else speaking against it maybe you can informally do it I would leave that uh to Ben

1:07:19 uh okay slider being slogan I normally do a break in between the break was your question in time I think this time yeah all right the submissions are on canvas which means essentially a PDF should be the main thing but we'll talk more about this

1:07:41 um it's called turnitin you'll you'll see it on canvas when we set up the assessments right uh whenever whenever you are asked I guess maybe you're gone by now uh sure I mean yeah what can we do

1:08:05 there will be some proofs uh often not very formal in the in the details but we'll cover more proofs tomorrow in the kind of style that I think you should have some background in um the exam questions often end up very low on proofs because that's not that's not my focus for the module but I think uh formal thinking is is important in algorithms so it's not a it's not nothing

1:08:40 uh good question I think you can I think you can if it's before the deadline yeah I know it's fairly strict so paraphrasing in your own words the thing is if you do this and don't cite the source that's the problem right you're stealing someone else's thoughts they had a brilliant idea and you steal the idea you just put it in your own words and so that's the part that we don't like uh in that sense it would be considered plagiarism but of course it's another question how to detect it

1:09:23 yeah so uh I think we're all a bit exhausted um but I would still like to do something with you now we may have to start this and you finish it off uh sometime sometime later I'd like to do a prior knowledge survey with you which is a a little bit um it needs some mental capacity to do it properly so let me motivate why first of all it's it's totally Anonymous and so on it's a Google forms and I don't care uh I don't care who scores what in this I want to get an aggregate feeling what what kind of prior knowledge you have and the idea is to help me in putting a bit of focus on different topics or maybe not if everyone's already up to speed the questions cover the the questions cover a lot of topics that are only tang and gentle important for this module but I think they're they're representative of what you've done before coming here so I'd like to ask you to fill this out um and don't guess all the questions have I don't know and it's fine some of the things that are asked are not really relevant for the module I just want to see if you know them I make an effort to answer it correctly

1:10:49 there's no real time pressures I normally give half an hour to an hour in in the lecture slot we technically have 45 minutes till five but I don't really want to keep you for two hours here but please please fill it out it's very helpful for for me and hence for you uh so but you don't necessarily have to do it in this room um that's all right let's say yeah it's not much time till we see each other tomorrow morning again right not much time so maybe let's do this until next week so if you if you don't have time to do it I'll check how many you have submitted till tomorrow maybe we can discuss it briefly otherwise next week