We will probably spend about half of the in-class time discussing projects, in the form of a research group meeting. Each of you will present your project to the class at several points during the semester, and the class will discuss it with you. I hope that this kind of forum will be a valuable educational experience, and will help direct the projects in fruitful ways.
In addition, there are a number of topics that I think will be applicable to more than one project. I will prepare lectures on at least some of the following:
Topic 1: Scientific inquiry, falsifiability and probability.
Topic 2: Random number generation and Monte Carlo simulation.
Topic 3: Modeling.
Topic 4: Queueing theory.
Topic 5: Event-driven simulation.
Topic 6: Visualizing quantitative information.
Topic 7: Data-intensive computing.
Topic 8: Genome databases, the MEME project.
Topic 9: Architectures for scientific computing: sequential, parallel, distributed.
Topic 10: Distributed computing, persistent objects, CORBA.
There may be additional topics, depending on the projects the class selects.