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JamCoders Lecture 1: Introduction

Boaz�Barak

July 2022, UWI, Jamaica

Thank you!

Chronixx

Survival and Flourishing Fund

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Who am I

  • Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
  • Co director of undergraduate studies at Harvard CS
  • Teaching/Research: Theory of computation, complexity, cryptography, theory of machine learning.
  • Originally from Israel, didn’t plan to study CS in college.

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The team

Gunjan Mansingh

Week 2

Week 3

Jelani Nelson

Week 4

Timnit Gebru

Lecturers:

Organizers:

Gunjan, Jelani and

Ra Bacchus

Joel Beazer

Daniel Fokum

Elecia Myers

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TAs

Bryan Baker

Joel Beazer

Michael Girma

Jabari Hastings

Tyler Hou

Bereket Molla

Annamira O’Toole

Orr Paradise

Anakai Richards

Nadia Sharp

Elijah Tai

Natnael Teshome

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Why Computer Science?

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“We are known for our athletes, music, and culture. Now we must become known for being innovators and creators in science and technology”

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Why Algorithms?

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PageRank Algorithm

Fast algorithm to find which pages have more links pointing to them.

The foundation for Google

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Back propagation algorithm

Compute faster derivatives of Neural Network

Responsible for the “Deep Learning” revolution.

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Consistent Hashing Data Structure

New data structure to store web pages on servers for faster delivery

200+ Terrabits per second

(Stream 200 Million movies simultaneously)

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Compressed Sensing

New algorithm to recover images from a tiny number of measurements.

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What this course is about

Algorithms and Data Structures – the ❤️ of computer science.

Some programming in

What this course is not about

How to build a website/ app / use latest in-fashion tool

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Let’s start

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Computational Task

Input

Output

[17,5,3,12,27]

Algorithm: A precise set of instruction how to obtain output from the input

Minimum element:

 

 

Exercise: Write down instructions for minimum element

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Minimum Element

Instructions:

 

 

 

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variables

Define a function

input

input

output

function

output

loop

if statement

Length of list L

Element of L at position 0 (= first)

Element of L at position i (= i+1th)

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Variables

Store data

Operations

Act on data

Control

Decide when to act