Computer Science
This site collects lots of useful pointers in general. For example, you will
certainly get something out from here when you are not sure the definition of a
technical term related to computer science, or when you want to find a
special interest group quickly, regardless whether you are truly a beginner in
computer science or you have been quite advanced. Of course, if you want to find some useful information such as tutorials, book recommendations, journals for a specific area in computer
science, we will also take you to areas such as architecture,
artificial
intelligence, computational biology and bioinformatics,
database systems, graphics,
networks, computing theory. If you just want to tutor yourself on
a software or a programming language, we have that too.
Front Page of the Learning Center
Architecture
Computer architecture is the science and art of selecting and interconnecting
hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and
cost goals. Computer architecture is not about using computers to design
buildings. "System building is a first-class activity!"
- WWW Computer Architecture Page
in the CS department at the Univ. of Wisconsin. It includes all kinds of
stuff, people, groups, conferences, tools, etc. Its
French mirror and Japanese
mirror are also available.
- Computer architecture groups at
Purdue,
Georgia
Tech, and Washington.
Do not forget to take a look at
Yahoo
Computer Architecture group.
- Course notes on
computer architecture at UC Berkeley.
- Recommended books: "Computer
Architecture: a Quantitative Approach", by Hennessy & Patterson;
Morgan Kauffmann, 1996 (2nd ed.), and "Computer
Architecture: pipelined and parallel processor design", by Flynn;
Jones & Bartlett, 1995.
- Computer Architecture Letters,
published by IEEE Computer Society.
- A cool webpage on
computer architecture, designed and maintained by Philip Koopman at CMU.
It has pointers to lots of interesting and informative websites.
- Who's who in
computer architecture leads you to many researchers in computer
architecture and compilers.
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Artificial Intelligence
Understanding intelligence and creating intelligent artifacts, the twin goals
of artificial intelligence (AI), represent two of the final frontiers of modern
science.
"I could feel, I could smell, a new kind of intelligence across the table."--Garry Kasparov
- An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
includes the definition, motivation, limitations,... However, there are some
bad links. Once you've finished reading the introduction, if you are
interested in knowing more about AI, the first thing you should do is visit
the Artificial Intelligence Depot's
main page.
- Another comprehensive introduction at ThinkQuest.
- Comprehensive
online tutorials and books on Artificial Intelligence at
BRILLIANeT.
-
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at CMU. You can find many interesting
projects there.
- Artificial intelligence groups at MIT,
Michigan, and
Univeristy of Zurich. Do
not forget to take a look at
Yahoo AI group.
- A leading textbook on Artificial intelligence, "Artificial
Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by
Stuart Russell and
Peter Norvig.
- Journals:
Artificial Intelligence, ELSEVIER;
Journal of
Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
(Its WWW site is in the CS department at the
Univ. of Washington).
- The Bibliography on
Artificial Intelligence in
The Collection of Computer
Science Bibliographies. For other computer science subjects, you may also
want to give a try in this collection.
- Academic Societies: American Association
for Artificial Intelligence, Association
for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence,
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Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
As a young science, computational biology offers a wealth of research
opportunities.
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Database systems
Interests range from developing efficient algorithms for very large data
sets to building large-scale systems for new and emerging applications.
- There are tons of online course materials. Here lists a few websites:
A First Course in
Database Systems at Stanford,
Introduction to Database
Systems at UMBC,
Introduction to Database Systems
at Washington, and
Analysis & Design
of Accounting Databases at SUNY-Albany. Some of them have an
Oracle guide.
- Journals: ACM Transactions on
Database Systems (TODS), part of the family of journals produced by the
ACM;
IEEE Data
Engineering Bulletin.
- Take you to tour the
DB groups
around the world.
- DBLP
bibliography server, a computer science bibliography, lists more than
545000 articles. It also provides pointers to sites of conference information,
journals, lecture notes series, books, and many more.
- Database groups at Stanford,
CMU, and the
University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The database groups at
Yahoo and About.com are very
informative, especially to a person who wants to know some basics.
- Data mining: finding interesting patterns, structures, clusters, etc., in
large amounts of data.
- "Evolving data mining into solutions for insights", by Fayyad, U., R.
Uthurusamy, is published in
Comm. ACM 45
(8) 2002.
- "On the use of optimization for data mining: Theoretical interactions
and eCRM opportunities", by Padmanabhan, B. and A. Tuzhilin. is published in
Management
Science 49 (10) 2003.
- SIGKDD: a
professional data mining society.
- A comprehensive list of pointers to
many database-related websites
maintained by the DB group at UMASS.
- Oracle guide: An online Oracle FAQ;
the international Oracle users group.
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Graphics
- Knowledge
Hound has tips, tutorials on computer graphics covering 3D modeling,
animation, compression, rendering, and many other topics.
- Some online computer graphics course materials: computer graphics at the
Imperial College
London, at Rice, at
UC Davis.
- The computer
graphics bookmarks leads you to lots of tutorials related to graphics and serves
as a collection of educational resources. Additionally, it has something on
computational geometry.
- A correct and voluminous collection of online sources connected with
computer graphics, LS
VII Computer Graphics on the Net provides information on conferences and
workshops as well as research related servers all around the world.
- An excellent site for information about various photomosaic programs can
be found at William Leigh Hunt's
website.
- Tons of exciting computer-made graphs in the gallery of student projects
in the computer graphics
group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In the same site, there are
also some pieces of video footage.
- A lot of cool stuff can be found in the
CMU Graphics Lab including
motion capture, physically based modeling & animation, rendering, and vision
and graphics.
- Some cool demos can be found in the
Stanford Graphics Lab.
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Networks and Security
"The nation's security and economy rely on infrastructures for communication,
finance, energy distribution and transportation - all increasingly dependent on
networked information systems. When these networked information systems perform
badly or do not work at all, they put life, liberty and property at risk." --
National Research Council, Trust in Cyberspace
- The Network Security Library collects hundreds of articles, FAQs, white papers and books on
network security, gathered from various sources throughout the industry.
- Introduction to
Network Security, good introductory material for all people who want to
know network security.
- Network Magazine helps you
follow the moves of all IT industry giants. It also includes some tutorials
for necessary knowledge on computer networks.
- The
Networking Tutorial includes Computer Training Online, IT toolbox
Networking, etc. Check it out! You can try it for free.
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Theory of Computing
It is a young science with many of the central questions still unanswered;
and it is a science poised to have considerable impact on current issues in the
development of systems and software, the nation's network and communications
infrastructure, and the physical and biological sciences. Areas such as the
algorithms, complexity, etc are close siblings of some areas in operations
research. Many researchers from these areas have shared research interests with
operations researchers, especially those are inclined to call themselves
mathematical programmers.
- Algorithms
- Algorithms
Course Materials on the Net by Kirk Pruhs, contains dozens of links to
lecture notes, problems, handouts, etc. from courses with difference levels at
several universities. Unfortunately, the website has not been maintained for a
while. Some links may be bad now.
- The Stony Brook Algorithm
Repository by Steven S. Skiena contains tons of problems ranging from data
structure to set and string problems. Algorithms are implemented in several
computer languages. When you are frustrated with coding an algorithm, take a
look at this repository, you may find exactly what you want.
- Some survey
papers by David B. Shmoys et al. are downloadable in his homepage.
- A classic text used by lots of schools in their introductory-level
algorithms courses: Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd edition, by T.H.
Cormen, C.E. Leiserson, R.L. Rivest, and C. Stein. Here is
the book information at Amazon.com.
- A
book on approximation algorithms by Dorit S. Hochbaum, Approximation
Algorithms for NP-Hard Problems. In her webpage, you will find a brief
introduction of the book as well as the table of contents. Here is
the book information at Amazon.com.
-
A good and comprehensive introduction to the theory of computation by
Eitan Gurari. The book is entirely available online.
- The
Theory Page, maintained by Suresh Venkatsubramanian. It has pointers to
journals,
conferences,
software.
- DIMACS (Center for Discrete
Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) has a lot of conference and
workshop information.
- Quantum Computing, a quite interesting and active field. Here is
an online
introduction to the quantum computer and quantum computing. It also
includes some references and a glossary. This webpage also provides a pointer
to a list of home
pages owned by researchers working in quantum computing and some other
related fields.
- Challenges
for Theory of Computing, the report of a workshop on research in theoretical
computer science in April, 1999. It is a short article but a good summary of
experts' opinions.
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Programming Languages and Software
This is not a list of pointers and references to the present research
frontier in this area. It is rather a list of a few useful software that most of
us are using or will have to be using. If you do not know where you can find
what you want from the humongous amount of information, ask your question in
google newsgroup
comp.lang. Anyway, there are tons of online materials including
tutorials, FAQs, etc. You just need to google them and will obtain lots of
results.
- Java:
- Java Tutorial from
Sun.com: downloadable tutorial materials organized via trails--groups of
lessons on several specific subjects. You will also find some recent
tutorial books that can be purchased online.
- LaTeX and its relatives. Here are a few to get started. Click here
for more links.
- Two online user's manual I use quite often: "Getting Started with LaTex",
by David R. Wilkins, and "LaTeX help 1.1",
by Leslie Lamport.
- BibTeX
-- basic documentation of the companion that enables you to keep a separate
bibliography file. At least in mathematics, it has become standard and
enables a searchable database as you find in the extensive
collection by
Alf-Christian Achilles.
- Average lifetime of websites with tutorials on LaTeX is just a few
months. Therefore, we suggest you utilize the (relatively) up-to-date Yahoo
directory.
- LaTeX2e has a lot of
handy features. You can download the user guide for reference.
- MikTeX, an implementation of TeX, at
MikTeX project page,
from
which you can download most recent MikTeX packages.
- WinEdt, a free software for TeX
editing in the Windows environment, has lots of useful features.
- Computing software
survey, by INFROMS OR/MS Today, compiles vendor-supplied information into
easy-to-read matrices to allow quick comparisons of features. It also
includes vendor directories that allow you to contact certain suppliers.
(maybe more!!)
- C/C++
- Learn C/C++ Today:
self claims one of the best C programming tutorials out there on the WWW. It
includes a list of a few C/C++ tutorials available online.
- C and C++ tutorials:
covers the main aspects of C and allows the reader to understand more advanced
materials. It also has recommendations on C/C++ books and offers tutorials on
assembly programming and CGI programming.
- The Cplusplus.com
tutorial, complete C++ language tutorial. The website also has other
information, documents, references and source codes.
- If you are a long-time C user and want to move on to C++, here is a good
C++ tutorial for C
users. It can also be interesting for C++ users who leave out some
possibilities of the language.
-
C/C++ Programming References provides links to many many sites on
general stuff, C/C++ tutorials, and even a bibliography of C language.
- HTML and the Internet
- XML/Perl
- SQL
- A gentle introduction to SQL by Andrew
Cumming, is an interactive SQL tutorial covering most of commonly used SQL
software. One interactive example used in the
site is the CIA World Factbook.
- SQL reference
page by Derrick Brashear includes general information, SQL syntax
information, SQL software, SQL tools, etc.
- Other sites where you can get help:
SQL tutorial by
Chuo-Han Lee,
SQL FAQ by Jean Anderson,
Introduction to SQL by James Hoffman.
- Some Open Source Software / Free Software Sites
- Brady Hunsaker has
an excellent
webpage on open source that includes the slides of a seminar on
open-source software he gave recently as well as many many links to
open-source software.
- Take a look at the website of open source for the operations research
community,
COIN-OR. You may find a solver perfectly for your problem and download
it without paying a penny.
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Front Page of the Learning Center
Send comments, suggestions, and
corrections to Nan Kong at nkong at
ie.pitt.edu
Last updated:
09/06/2004