At Pitt, we are always striving to improve our commitment to diversity and inclusion, and that includes promoting the most inclusive learning environmennt possible. I view diversity as a resource and a strength of our community, and I want to make this course work for studeents of all identities. It is my intent to teach in a way that is as respectful and inclusive as possible with regard to: race, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, cultural background, as well as any other identities that I have unintentionally missed. I am always open to your suggestions, comments, concerns, and constructive criticism on how I carry out this ethos.
At Pitt we have stringent community standards for the treatment of others. I will not tolerate any hate speech, bullying, or harassment of any kind, and I will report any violations of our code of conduct to the Title IX office.
Please feel free to let me know what name and pronouns you prefer to go by, and/or how you want your name to be pronounced, and I will make sure to address you how you want to be addressed.
In order to accommodate the observance of religious holidays, students should inform the instructor (by email, within the first two weeks of the term) of any such days which conflict with scheduled class activities.
If you have a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and Disability Resources and Services (DRS), 140 William Pitt Union, (412) 648-7890, drsrecep@pitt.edu, (412) 228-5347 for P# ASL users, as early as possible in the term. DRS will verify your disability and determine whether reasonable accommodation(s) for this course are warranted. It is the responsibility of any student seeking accommodation(s) for this course to present any necessary documentation to the instructor by the start of the term.
Officially, you are required to have taken CMPINF 2100: Introduction to Data-centric Computation in order to enroll in this course. Unofficially, we are accepting students even if they haven't taken this CMPINF 2100. However, I will be assuming you are familiar with the core skills covered in CMPINF 2100. From a computer programming perspective, thism eans I am assuming that you are familiar with python, numpy, matplotlib, scipy, pandas, and jupyter notebooks. If you aren't familiar with these tools, the course is going to be difficult to follow.
Here is a good guage of whether you are prepared to take this course: can you complete the following workflow?
By default we will use the following standard scale:
10% of your grade will be based on simply showing up to class and participating. If you can't or don't want to come to class for whatever reason, you are by no means obligated to attend - you can get an A without this. But if you show up and participate, you will have a 10% buffer. Attendance will be taken using Top Hat.
I understand that circumstances will come up and you might not be able to make it to every second of every lecture. To account for this, I will give you a 10% boost to your attendance score at the end of the semester. If you attended at least 90% of the classes, you will be given a perfect attendance score; if your attendance score was 80%, it will be increated to 90% at the end of the semester; and so on.
The main way we will evaluate you in this course is through homework assignments. We will provide you a dataset, and you will apply techniques from class to the data. You will submit a Jupyter notebook with your code and visualizations, and we will verify that your results match the expected output.
Throughout the semester, you will conduct an independent data science project. You will pose a question, find a dataset, clean the data, apply several predictive models to the data, and coalesce your results into a compelling story. At the end of the semester you will present your results to the class.
We need some way to evaluate your personal understanding of the material without the help of your instructor or classmates. That said, I am not a fan of timed exams. Thus, at the end of the semester I will administer a take-home, open-note, open-book quiz on Canvas. The only time limit is that you need to finish it by the end of finals week. This will not be a programming quiz; it will simply be a quiz on what techniques are applicable to what kinds of problems, and what assumptions are made by different kinds of models. This exam is mostly for checking that you don't just understand how to plug your data into different models, but how to think about which model to use.
We want you to succeed in this course, but we also want you to succeed with integrity. We want to make sure that you actually learn the material, so that the impact of the course doesn't disappear once the quarter ends. We also want to make sure that every student has a fair chance to succeed, and isn't being taken advantage of by his or her peers. You worked very hard to get into a prestigious school like Pitt, and without enforcing academic integrity that very prestige would quickly crumble. Finally, it would be cartoonishly malicious and cynical to take advantage of the Covid pandemic to circumvent normal academic integrity violations. I can assure you that any grade increase that you receive in this class due to cheating will not benefit you nearly enough to offset the guilt of knowing that you tried to use a global pandemic for grade profiteering.
In this course we expect students to adhere to the University of Pittsburgh of Scholarship Policy. This means that you will complete your work honestly, with integrity, and support and environment of integrity within the class. Here are few examples of what is considered as reasonable and unreasonable collaboration.
Reasonable
I will accept late work; however, I will impose a late penalty of 0.5% for each hour that an assignment is late. This means that if an assignment is a full day late, you will lose 24 * 0.5% = 12%. Note that canvas rounds up to the next hour, so if you are just 5 minutes late, this will be rounded up to 1 hour and you will still lose 0.5%. This late penalty applies to all assigned work. There is, however, a way to avoid late penalties...
I understand that circumstances come up - family or medical situations, tough work in other classes, extracurricular commitments, your social life, etc. For this class, you have three (3) late tokens. A late token grants you the ability to turn in an assignment 24 hours late without incurring any penalties. You may use a late token on any assignment, and you may use multiple tokens on the same assignment. Late tokens are cannot be transferred from one student to another. Late tokens cannot be split into fractional tokens. When you want to use a late token, email me and tell me which assignment you want to use a late token on (and how many tokens you want to use). You may request to use a late token at any time during the semester. You may use late tokens retroactively even after an assignment is due. You may retract a late token to save it or re-allocate it to a different assignment. You may not use a late token on the exam.
You may not use late tokens on the final exam or final project.
If you ever accidentally submit the wrong document, and you don't realize this until well after the deadline has passed, you can get a one-time "mulligan" to resubmit the assignment without penalty. However, you must use a late tokens to get a mulligan. Furthermore, you may only get one mulligan per semester. Please be careful and make sure you upload the right document when you submit an assignment! Some additional notes:
If you have a family or a medical emergency (including a mental health emergency), or if we encounter the literal apocalypse, I can grant you an extension without using a late token. In most circumstances, however, I will probably ask you to simply use a late token or take the late penalty. I reserve the right to request some sort of doctors or parent's note should you make such a request.
Grades can be appealed up to two weeks after they have been posted; no appeals will be considered after that time. Please note that the entire assignment will be regraded upon appeal.
To ensure the free and open discussion of ideas, students may not record classroom lectures, discussion and/or activities without the advance written permission of the instructor, and any such recording properly approved in advance can be used solely for the student's own private use.
All material provided through course websites is subject to copyright. This applies to class/recitation notes, slides, assignments, solutions, project descriptions, etc. You are allowed (and expected!) to use all of the provided material for personal use. However, you are strictly prohibited from sharing the material with others in general and from posting the material on the web or other file sharing venues in particular.
In order to accommodate the observance of religious holidays, students should inform the instructor (by email, within the first two weeks of the term) of any such days which conflict with scheduled class activities.
At Pitt, we are committed to providing instruction in the safest and most responsible manner possible. We strongly encourage you to get a vaccine and a booster. You are also exptected to wear a mask when you are in the classroom or in my office for student hours. Please check out https://www.coronavirus.pitt.edu/ for more information on the guidelines that Pitt is recommending to mitigate the effects of the pandeminc.