CS99I

CS99I Freshman Seminar:
Traveling the Information Highways

Winter 1997/1998.
3 units of credit. Enrollment limited to 16 students, freshmen have priority.
Meeting times: Tuesday, 10-11 and 11-12am *, Fridays 10-12am
(* split group).
Meeting room: Gates Info Sciences 4B, room 498 (fourth floor, B-wing right).
First Class meeting Friday, January 9th, at 10 am.

Draft course definition, 10 Jun 1997, updated 22 Oct 1997, finalized 10 Jan 1998.

Traveling the Information Highways:
Maps, Encounters, and Directions.

Objective

This seminar is intended to help students understand what is happening in the emerging information highways and how to assess their benefits. We will focus on the use of the Internet for scientific and commercial communication. We will present enough of the technology for students to have a sense of what is possible, what potential pitfalls exist along the way, and where things are likely to go in the future.

Instructor: Prof. Gio Wiederhold, Computer Science, Gates 433, email to: gio@cs.stanford.edu.
Secretary: Marianne Siroker, Gates 436, 725-8363.
For appointments please email to: siroker@cs.stanford.edu.
To contact other students you can use the classlist anonymized.

A useful complementary course is CS1I, taught in the winter by Nick Parlante (Th 2:45-4:00).

Meeting format:

We will spend the initial half of each Friday session presenting a topic of concern to the Internet, and the remainder of the time discussing its import and potential. Following the open tradition of the Internet we publish the results of the course on the World-wide-web, so that the material can be shared beyond the participants of the class. A description of this Web-book is given in a Introductory Chapter. A list of all chapters given is found there on List of Chapters.

The Tuesday time is intended to focus on research and writing. It also is available for problems you might want to bring to office hours otherwise. A tentative topic schedule is available.

Detailed Course Description

We will use the first week to present the technology at a conceptual level, largely by comparing the Internet (draft on-line) with alternate means of communication, as the telephone, electronic mail, fax, and books. Much of the remainder of the course will focus on application topics.

This is NOT a course in Net-surfing. A prerequisite for this course is having some facility in using computers and exploring the world-wide web, as presented in CS1I. We know that most students are better at all kinds of surfing than the faculty will ever be. The discussions will explore the opportunities presented and limited by the Internet, rather than the mechanisms of how to access its contents.

Digital libraries (draft on-line) promise universal accessibility to all that is and will be written. Anyone can be a reader and an author. No drivers licenses are required for traveling on the electronic highways. The filtering role of publishers, reviewers, indexers, booksellers, and librarians is changing radically. New business are springing up to replace traditional functions. New models for information creation and dissemination become essential to assess value to the readers and opportunities for authors. This course, by publishing its results on the web, will provide its own experiment.
The direct contents if the Internet is information, but information is non functional unless employed. The primary use of information is planning (not yet on-line), the assessemnt of current state and resources, projecting the effect of possible actions into the future, and then selecting which actions create the highest benefit at lowest cost.
Changes in education (some material on-line) are expected to occur. When lectures with live presentations are available to all, how will educational institutions distinguish themselves on the Internet? We will need metrics to let students assess and select courses and faculty when choices are many and remote. Future textbooks can be composed to match a specific curriculum. Formulas will show their results on-line. How significant is the entertainment component of a course versus its intellectual and conceptual contents?
Healthcare (some material on-line) today is in a critical balance between services and costs. There is plentiful medical advice on the web, but assessing it for ones own sake is difficult and risky. New technologies can be disseminated rapidly. The role differentiation of the specialist expert versus the local family provider may sharpen when significant portions of healthcare services can be delivered remotely.
Electronic commerce (layout on-line) is in its infancy. While direct inspection of goods to be purchased is lost, the buyer has gained access to the entire world market. Better descriptions, perhaps with dynamic simulations, have to compensate for lack of direct interaction. When parts of larger systems are purchased standards for their interoperation are crucial. Trust in the presentations and delivery has to be gained. New payment mechanisms are being tried to simplify electronic purchasing and reduce the overhead costs per transaction. Again, there will be new businesses to manage electronic commerce, and provide the mix of services now allocated to designers, producers, buyers, distributors, and retailers.
Security and protection of privacy (draft on-line) is a concern for many. There is impressive technology in encryption, but it can protect crooks as well as legitimate businesses. The tradeoff of having an open society and protecting individuals from intrusion by snoopers, competitors, and aggressive marketeers is in flux. A recent example is making Social Security Benefit data available to individuals via the web, fulfilling a congressional obligation and creating liabilities in protecting privacy. Security on the electronic highways poses new challenges for defense, for legal developments, and for technological support.

There are a number of optional topics that may be selected if interest warrants:
Manufacturing (not yet on-line) uses of the Internet will be important for the economy.
Also general electronic commerce (outline on-line) will occur via the Internet in the future.
Information, available from the web is crucial for planning and decision-making (not yet on-line).

Technologies and services that are relevant include
databases (not yet on-line) that document the past and
simulations (not yet on-line) to predict the future.
Dealing with the problems of the heterogenity of the world requires mediation (not yet on-line).
Finally, programming and assembly of the software components (not yet on-line) contributes the building blocks of all the electronic information systems esytems we consider.

Projecting the current rate of advances into future (not yet on-line) periods, say, when our current freshman class will graduate, is a mojor challenge. We are just on the cusp of moving from a paper-based world to a world where electronic communication supersedes much of the technology developed since Gutenberg.

In time, they will be active contributors in this world. Since we cannot predict the shape, and the rate of its arrival, it is easy to teach solely what we know and have experienced. But planning for a future, while ignoring these changes, is a poor strategy.

Glossary and References

To help in reading this material, specifically if chapters are accessed randomly, we will maintain a glossary. Any word that is usee, and not understood by a participant should be entered. That requires sending an email message to to: gio@cs.stanford.edu with the term, and any defintion you have found or made up.

We will also build up a list of references during the course. As the references are read course participants will append their reviews to the entries.

All the work in this course will create web pages, using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). We have placed a brief introduction to HTML with the other documents. We will want to use a consistent format as well, that is described in the introductory chapter.

Fin

First chapter

List of all Chapters.

Hit's since 1998/01/26:

CS99I Freshman Seminar: Traveling the Information Highways