Courses tagged with "Before 1300: Ancient and Medieval History" (148)

This subject offers an interactive introduction to discrete mathematics oriented toward computer science and engineering. The subject coverage divides roughly into thirds:

1. Fundamental concepts of mathematics: Definitions, proofs, sets, functions, relations.
2. Discrete structures: graphs, state machines, modular arithmetic, counting.
3. Discrete probability theory.

On completion of 6.042J, students will be able to explain and apply the basic methods of discrete (noncontinuous) mathematics in computer science. They will be able to use these methods in subsequent courses in the design and analysis of algorithms, computability theory, software engineering, and computer systems.

Interactive site components can be found on the Unit pages in the left-hand navigational bar, starting with Unit 1: Proofs.

This course outlines the physics, modeling, application, and technology of compound semiconductors (primarily III-Vs) in electronic, optoelectronic, and photonic devices and integrated circuits. Topics include: properties, preparation, and processing of compound semiconductors; theory and practice of heterojunctions, quantum structures, and pseudomorphic strained layers; metal-semiconductor field effect transistors (MESFETs); heterojunction field effect transistors (HFETs) and bipolar transistors (HBTs); photodiodes, vertical-and in-plane-cavity laser diodes, and other optoelectronic devices.

This course introduces students to both passive and active electronic components (op-amps, 555 timers, TTL digital circuits). Basic analog and digital circuits and theory of operation are covered. The labs allow the students to master the use of electronic instruments and construct and/or solder several circuits. The labs also reinforce the concepts discussed in class with a hands-on approach and allow the students to gain significant experience with electrical instruments such as function generators, digital multimeters, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and power supplies. In the last lab, the students build an electronic circuit that they can keep. The course is geared to freshmen and others who want an introduction to electronics circuits.

This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

Machine Vision provides an intensive introduction to the process of generating a symbolic description of an environment from an image. Lectures describe the physics of image formation, motion vision, and recovering shapes from shading. Binary image processing and filtering are presented as preprocessing steps. Further topics include photogrammetry, object representation alignment, analog VLSI and computational vision. Applications to robotics and intelligent machine interaction are discussed.

Welcome to 6.041/6.431, a subject on the modeling and analysis of random phenomena and processes, including the basics of statistical inference. Nowadays, there is broad consensus that the ability to think probabilistically is a fundamental component of scientific literacy. For example:

• The concept of statistical significance (to be touched upon at the end of this course) is considered by the Financial Times as one of "The Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science".
• A recent Scientific American article argues that statistical literacy is crucial in making health-related decisions.
• Finally, an article in the New York Times identifies statistical data analysis as an upcoming profession, valuable everywhere, from Google and Netflix to the Office of Management and Budget.

The aim of this class is to introduce the relevant models, skills, and tools, by combining mathematics with conceptual understanding and intuition.

6.345 introduces students to the rapidly developing field of automatic speech recognition. Its content is divided into three parts. Part I deals with background material in the acoustic theory of speech production, acoustic-phonetics, and signal representation. Part II describes algorithmic aspects of speech recognition systems including pattern classification, search algorithms, stochastic modelling, and language modelling techniques. Part III compares and contrasts the various approaches to speech recognition, and describes advanced techniques used for acoustic-phonetic modelling, robust speech recognition, speaker adaptation, processing paralinguistic information, speech understanding, and multimodal processing.

This course presents a top-down approach to communications system design. The course will cover communication theory, algorithms and implementation architectures for essential blocks in modern physical-layer communication systems (coders and decoders, filters, multi-tone modulation, synchronization sub-systems). The course is hands-on, with a project component serving as a vehicle for study of different communication techniques, architectures and implementations. This year, the project is focused on WLAN transceivers. At the end of the course, students will have gone through the complete WLAN System-On-a-Chip design process, from communication theory, through algorithm and architecture all the way to the synthesized standard-cell RTL chip representation.

This course provides a challenging introduction to some of the central ideas of theoretical computer science. It attempts to present a vision of "computer science beyond computers": that is, CS as a set of mathematical tools for understanding complex systems such as universes and minds. Beginning in antiquity—with Euclid's algorithm and other ancient examples of computational thinking—the course will progress rapidly through propositional logic, Turing machines and computability, finite automata, Gödel's theorems, efficient algorithms and reducibility, NP-completeness, the P versus NP problem, decision trees and other concrete computational models, the power of randomness, cryptography and one-way functions, computational theories of learning, interactive proofs, and quantum computing and the physical limits of computation. Class participation is essential, as the class will include discussion and debate about the implications of many of these ideas.

This course introduces students to the basic knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning methods of artificial intelligence. Upon completion of 6.034, students should be able to develop intelligent systems by assembling solutions to concrete computational problems; understand the role of knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning in intelligent-system engineering; and appreciate the role of problem solving, vision, and language in understanding human intelligence from a computational perspective.

6.857 Network and Computer Security is an upper-level undergraduate, first-year graduate course on network and computer security. It fits within the Computer Systems and Architecture Engineering concentration.

6.728 is offered under the department's "Devices, Circuits, and Systems" concentration. The course covers concepts in elementary quantum mechanics and statistical physics, introduces applied quantum physics, and emphasizes an experimental basis for quantum mechanics. Concepts covered include: Schrodinger's equation applied to the free particle, tunneling, the harmonic oscillator, and hydrogen atom, variational methods, Fermi-Dirac, Bose-Einstein, and Boltzmann distribution functions, and simple models for metals, semiconductors, and devices such as electron microscopes, scanning tunneling microscope, thermonic emitters, atomic force microscope, and others.

This course provides a thorough introduction to the C programming language, the workhorse of the UNIX operating system and lingua franca of embedded processors and micro-controllers. The first two weeks will cover basic syntax and grammar, and expose students to practical programming techniques. The remaining lectures will focus on more advanced concepts, such as dynamic memory allocation, concurrency and synchronization, UNIX signals and process control, library development and usage. Daily programming assignments and weekly laboratory exercises are required. Knowledge of C is highly marketable for summer internships, UROPs, and full-time positions in software and embedded systems development.

This course covers the algorithmic and machine learning foundations of computational biology combining theory with practice. We cover both foundational topics in computational biology, and current research frontiers. We study fundamental techniques, recent advances in the field, and work directly with current large-scale biological datasets.

This course analyzes issues associated with the implementation of higher-level programming languages. Topics covered include: fundamental concepts, functions, and structures of compilers, the interaction of theory and practice, and using tools in building software. The course includes a multi-person project on compiler design and implementation.

The course addresses dynamic systems, i.e., systems that evolve with time. Typically these systems have inputs and outputs; it is of interest to understand how the input affects the output (or, vice-versa, what inputs should be given to generate a desired output). In particular, we will concentrate on systems that can be modeled by Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), and that satisfy certain linearity and time-invariance conditions.

We will analyze the response of these systems to inputs and initial conditions. It is of particular interest to analyze systems obtained as interconnections (e.g., feedback) of two or more other systems. We will learn how to design (control) systems that ensure desirable properties (e.g., stability, performance) of the interconnection with a given dynamic system.

This course is a graduate introduction to natural language processing - the study of human language from a computational perspective. It covers syntactic, semantic and discourse processing models, emphasizing machine learning or corpus-based methods and algorithms. It also covers applications of these methods and models in syntactic parsing, information extraction, statistical machine translation, dialogue systems, and summarization. The subject qualifies as an Artificial Intelligence and Applications concentration subject.

This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python™ programming language.

This course introduces the theory of error-correcting codes to computer scientists. This theory, dating back to the works of Shannon and Hamming from the late 40's, overflows with theorems, techniques, and notions of interest to theoretical computer scientists. The course will focus on results of asymptotic and algorithmic significance. Principal topics include:

1. Construction and existence results for error-correcting codes.
2. Limitations on the combinatorial performance of error-correcting codes.
3. Decoding algorithms.
4. Applications in computer science.