Monsoon Semester, 2011

With increase in the usage of the Internet, there is an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter, Flickr, and the likes have changed the way the Internet is being used. There is lack of understanding of privacy and security issues on online social media among the users using these online services. There is a big need to study and characterize privacy and security of online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological, etc.). Students in the class will be required to read papers assigned for the week and send an individual summary before (at least 12 hours) the class of the week.
The class will be presentation and discussion format.

The course will provide the continuity in the mobile computing stream by providing the students in the stream an opportunity to build upon the understanding developed in the earlier courses on Mobile Computing and Embedded Systems. Half the classes in the course will involve a weekly seminar class on selected advanced topics covering several constraints in developing robust and scalable distributed sensing systems. Each of these seminars will be based on state of art research in that specific topic. For the rest half of classes, the students will be given a list of readings in the same areas that were covered in the earlier part. Each student will be required to make a class presentation based on that topic and covering these readings. The students will be expected to put into practice several of these advanced concepts by building real distributed systems. It is expected that these systems will address some real world sensing problem.
Course is primarily project oriented with a final exam on topics covered in the course. The students can also overlap some modules of their B.Tech Project with the project in the course. Projects should ideally be done individually.

Web 2.0 Platforms such as FaceBook (online social networking website), Twitter (online micro-blogging website) and YouTube (online video sharing website) are one of the most visited websites on the Internet, has millions of subscribers/active-users from all over the world spending huge amount of time on the site, are integrated with thousands of third-party active applications and have already created a phenomenal social and commercial impact. This course is intended for students who are passionate about developing creative, killer and practically-useful applications for such platforms. The course will cover some technical and non-technical aspects (such as platform architecture, protocols, ecosystem, programming APIs, relevant concepts on web-development, metrics to measure impact, scalability, user-interface design, response time, privacy issues, sample successful applications, deployment, testing, iterative improvement, monetization and commercial aspects etc) but will not be purely lecture/tutorial based.
The course will be group-based, project-oriented, hands-on, intensive and highly interactive. The students are expected to be self-driven, come up with their own ideas (a lot of intellectual freedom and space will be given but applications having malicious intent and harmful impact on the society will not be allowed/tolerated), implement/execute, test, deploy, continuously improve and demonstrate success/impact.