High School Dating (Bearman, Moody, and Stovel, 2004) (Image by Mark Newman)

Corporate E-Mail Communication (Adamic and Adar, 2005)

A course on how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections. Topics include: how opinions, fads, and political movements spread through society; the robustness and fragility of food webs and financial markets; and the technology, economics, and politics of Web information and on-line communities.

The course is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites; it satisfies the Arts & Sciences Social and Behavioral Analysis (SBA) distribution and the Engineering Liberal Studies (SBA group) distribution.

Office Hour Schedule

Materials

• We will be using the book Networks, Crowds, and Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which Professors Easley and Kleinberg co-wrote while teaching this course in its first few years. A complete draft is on-line at the Web page for the book, and the hardcopy version is for sale online and at the Campus Store.
• Over the past several years, we've offered an on-line version of the course through the edX platform. The materials from this course are now archived, and you can access them by registering on-line at the edX site. Although you can no longer take the edX course as a student, by registering you get access to the videos and on-line exercises. In the course this fall, this edX material will serve as a set of optional resources that you may find helpful for alternate presentations as well as a source of additional practice exercises.

Course Outline

Grading

• Grades on the homework, blog posts, midterm, and final will be weighted as follows:
  • Homework: 40% [9 assignments; lowest one dropped]
  • Homework must be submitted in PDF format using the gradescope site. (Gradescope can also be accessed from the course Canvas site. You should sign up on the gradescope site for CS 2850 even if you are taking it with a different course number. If the site asks you for an entry code, it is K33R4K.)
  • Midterm (in class, Monday Oct 3): 20%
  • Final Exam: 30%
  • Blog Posts: 10%
  • We will be maintaining a class weblog as part of the course, and posting to the blog will be part of the graded coursework. Information about the blog can be found in the blog guidelines handout.
  • iClicker participation: 0% (score will be considered for borderline cases)
  • We'll use clickers in lecture. You must use a clicker from the iClicker system. The process for registering an iClicker is described in the registration instructions.
  • Academic integrity guidelines require that you may only use your own registered clicker during class.

Class Discussion on Ed

We will be using Ed as a discussion forum for the class. You can access it through the course Canvas site (you should see a link on the left side of the course home page, at the bottom).

Academic Integrity

You are expected to maintain the utmost level of academic integrity in the course. Any violation of the code of academic integrity will be penalized severely.

You are allowed to collaborate on the homework to the extent of formulating ideas as a group. However, you must write up the solutions to each problem set completely on your own, and understand what you are writing. You must also list the names of everyone that you discussed the problem set with. Collaboration is not allowed on the other parts of the coursework.

Finally, plagiarism deserves special mention here. Including text from other sources in written assignments without quoting it and providing a proper citation constitutes plagiarism, and it is a serious form of academic misconduct. This includes cases in which no full sentence has been copied from the original source, but large amounts of text have been closely paraphrased without proper attribution. To get a better sense for what is allowed, it is highly recommended that you consult the guidelines maintained by Cornell on this topic. It is also worth noting that search engines have made plagiarism much easier to detect. This is a very serious issue; instances of plagiarism will very likely result in failing the course.