CS73N Freshman Seminar:
Business on the Information Highways
Winter 2003/2004.
Page last updated 19 December 2003.
Instructor: Gio Wiederhold,
CSD, Stanford.
Changes in Boldface
2 units of credit. Enrollment limited to 16 students, freshmen have
priority.
Meeting time and location:
Only Fridays 1:15-3:05pm, in Gates 260. This room is in the Computer Science department, close to equipment and stuff. See Map to locate Gates Info Sciences, in the circle.
There is a tentative topic Schedule, with some Notes, initialized from prior years, for each meeting.
Course definition
This page is http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/gio/CS99I/description.html
and can also be located via http://www-db.stanford.edu/people/gio.html or
simply http://CS99I.stanford.edu/ .
Information from prior years is available as CS99I
2003
description, 2002
description,
2001 description; 2000 description; 1998 description.
Traveling the Information Highways:
Maps, Encounters, and Directions.
Objective
Our seminar is intended to help us all understand what is happening in the emerging information highways and how to assess their benefits. There is no way that we can predict the future, but we can try to understand the forces and the constraints in several dimensions.
We will focus on the use of the Internet for commercial, educational, and scientific objectives. 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. Some points related to current perceptions are made in the slides on Web Growth
A relevant report is
Wiederhold, Gio: Trends for the Information Technology Industry; report prepared for MITI under sponsorship of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), San Francisco CA 94104, April 1999.
Instructor: Prof.Eneritus Gio Wiederhold, Computer
Science, Gates 433, email to: gio@cs.stanford.edu.
Secretary: Marianne Siroker, Gates 435, 725-8363.
For appointments please email to:
siroker@cs.stanford.edu.
To contact other students and see what the projects are you can use the classlist.
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 work will consist of essays on certain aspects of Internet activity. Students should decide in a topic before the end of January. In general, mailing me a paragraph or so about your topic and the issue within it plan you to address, will suffice. If you are unsure, please make an appointment through my secretary, Marianne <Siroker@cs.stanford.edu>. You will typically get a suitable time within a few days. (My work schedule is irregular, so that having office hours does not work well for me). 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 assessment 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. They will exploit greatly the capabbilities that have been developed to support entertainment. When lectures with live presentations and interactive textbooks 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 major 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.
Stanford's students will be active contributors within this world. Since we cannot predict the shape, and the rate of its arrival, we must cover more than solely what we know and have experienced. Preparing for a future without ongoing 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
For B2B communication a representation that uses more formal semantics to describe contents, XML, is becoming dominant. This eXtended Markup Language is also briefly described.
Fin
First
chapter
List
of all Chapters.
Hit's since 12 Jan 2000: