Week 11

It’s been amazing to see the progress everyone’s made this semester.

We’ll soon have the Hackathon in Cambridge, where we can meet friends while working on the final project, and the Fair, here in New Haven, where you can present those projects to the entire community.

Today we’ll start thinking about life after CS50, and present a few opportunities we have here at Yale, for those of you who want to continue down the path of learning Computer Science.

Professor Rushmeier teaches a variety of courses in the CS department, including computer graphics.

Computer graphics is the "use of computers to make and use images for exploration, communication, and expression."

Research topics include how to generate realistic images and how different image processing methods can be applied to other fields, such as studying statues.

Users find problems or areas of interest in the physical world, and data is taken to build digital models, which can then be used to find solutions or observations:

Here at Yale, there are various courses and a wide range of projects in the area of computer graphics, such as digital humanities, where computers might be used to help analyze manuscripts.

Professor Karbasi talks about sensing data, or how "systems can automatically acquire and reason about highly uncertain information."

Applications include automated summarization (such as finding the most important parts of a lecture to watch), automated teaching, and machine learning.

For automated summarization, an algorithm can take a short clip as input, and determine which frames are the most important:

With automated teaching, we want to find a way to choose optimal examples to show, in order to teach classification.

And finally, we want to build a robot to solve simple problems like opening a microwave with a low-fidelity sensor, figuring out how to by touching various points.

Professor Negahban from the Statistics department gives a demo of separating two audio tracks that have been combined, of two commentators of a sporting match.

With an algorithm that implement something called independent component analysis, a computer can separate the two tracks.

Professor Negahban also shows a website, Spurious Correlations, where two completely unrelated signals that happen to correlate are placed next to each other.

Professor Balakrishnan introduces systems, or the underlying foundation of a computer system that the higher-levels such as machine learning and computer graphics are built on.

An important concept is abstraction, which hides the "complexity of hardware."

One example is a file system, with which we can save files without knowing how each bit is actually saved to a disk.

End-to-end metrics are an important way to measure how well a system performs, such as its throughput, latency, and reliability.

Another area of study is building distributed systems, where many machines are connected to provide a single service, through replicating and partitioning data.

Bringing both campuses together has again been a great collaboration.

David lifts his black sweater to reveal an "I love Yale" shirt, which he’s been wearing "all this time."

We watch look back at CS50 this year.

Then we watch a video describing a prank a few years back, where two Yale students placed signs in Harvard Stadium that they then convinced fans to hold up during the game, only to reveal a message that read "WE SUCK."

Remember that, at the beginning of the semester we said, "what ultimately matters in this course is not so much where you end up relative to your classmates but where you, in Week 11, end up relative to yourself in Week 0."

In Week 0, we had all of you build something interesting with Scratch, and so we demonstrate some of the more interesting projects, including Bob the Bear by mandaleeyp, Cat Goes to Yale Final by JPBosco, and Spot the Freshman! Star Wars Edition @ Yale by justinc324.

With Problem Set 4, we also challenged you to a scavenger hunt, and Theodore has found the most staff members to take a photo with, so he and his section will win a special prize.

In Problem Set 5, we created the Big Board in which students and staff can compete for the fastest spell-checker solution, and this year the winner is Shreyas on staff.

We also had a CS50 Coding Contest, and the top performer at Yale was Julia, @apple_cider, who will also receive a prize.

We thank the production team, with whom we’ve been able to pre-produce lectures in Cambridge, such that the experience for students on both campuses are nearly the same now.

The outros at the end of each lecture are actually scenes from a short film the production team wrote and filmed over the summer, which we’ve combined here for you to get the full experience.

We also want to thank the team in New Haven, Patrick, the head TAs, and the rest of the staff that make this possible.

You too, can be involved next year. Visit https://cs50.yale.edu/apply to find out how!

Jason Hirschhorn, without whom CS50 at Yale would not be possible, used to tell great jokes at the beginning of staff meetings. (Ed. Note: Can confirm). David shares a clip that Facebook brought up from 5 years ago where Jason tells one such joke.

We’ll leave you with one last message, that problem-solving is just taking inputs and using an algorithm to find outputs we want.

Coming up soon is the CS50 Hackathon, an overnight event in Cambridge where we’ll serve multiple dinners and breakfast at IHOP, between which you’ll work on your final projects. Sign up at https://cs50.yale.edu/register.

We’ll also be holding a CS50 Fair on each campus, where you’ll present your final projects to other students and recruiters.

Now we play our game of Family Feud, based on the most popular responses you submitted to Problem Set 8.

We watch a thank you video to our staff to round out the course.

This was CS50!