Students in good standing are permitted (and in some cases encouraged) to take one or two independent studies courses. Generally the independent studies course is one in an area for which no regular course is offered (e.g. Type Theory, Action Semantics, Artificial Life, Modal Logic, Constraint Programming) and in which you are genuinely interested.

This page has information for students wishing to do independent studies courses under my supervision. Other faculty members will no doubt have different requirements.

At the end of an independent studies course you will have attained mastery of the chosen subject matter to the degree expected from a student taking a traditional course for about the same number of units.

Independent studies courses do not necessarily require research that breaks new ground in a subject area. That's nice, but not required. It is required for a thesis or dissertation, however.

The foremost requirement is that you do the proper amount of university quality work for the number of units you are taking. Do not expect a good grade for putting off everything until the last two weeks and hacking together a project.

You are expected to read at least

• Most of one or two classic textbooks in the subject area
• Two professional-oriented books (e.g. from O'Reilly or Prentice-Hall PTR)
• Six (preferably more) papers from journals or conference proceedings. Half can be "classic" papers that started the discipline; the rest should cover modern topics.
• Twenty or so encyclopedia articles on topics in your area. Wikipedia is okay, but try others. Blog entries by famous people (Martin Fowler, James Gosling) are okay if they are long enough.

You are required to generate:

• Answers to 40-60 textbook problems. Avoid the trivial "Check your Understanding" type of questions that generate one to ten word answers. Half the problems, though, can be of the short answer or "solve a relatively easy math problem" variety; the rest should require 15 or more minutes of thought.
• A book review (3-5 pages)
• A short paper (5-6 pages) overviewing or summarizing the subject area. Cover the major players in the field and the current uses of the technology today.
• A longer paper (10 pages) in which you describe one of the problems you are working on in your project. The paper will have code fragments in it.
• A project, and associated documentation (top-level architecture diagrams, etc.)
• A reading list, in bibliography format, of 40 or so sources that are important in your area. You do not have to read all of them, but you do have to put together a useful list. I assume you will acquaint yourself with at least some of them. (Don't stuff this list with web sites.)

During the semester:

• Each week, send me a very short email with a bullet-point summary of what you did all week (a progress report of sorts). If you prefer, you may keep a blog instead, as long as it is updated frequently.
• Meet with me every two weeks to discuss your progress.

On the last day of the semester, you are to turn in a binder (with dividers), neatly organized, and containing, in order

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• One page summary of the course
• List of the books you read
• Reprints of six of the journal articles
• Book review
• Your short paper
• Your long paper
• Exercises and solutions
• Overview of your project architecture (UML diagrams and links to the code)
• Selected printouts of portions of your code (10-20 pages, 2 up)
• The reading list

You must prepare yourself for a 15 minute informal "oral report" (I don't want to call it an "oral exam") in which we will discuss one-on-one what you have learned and what you have accomplished.

Your grade will be weighted on the following

• 80% on the portfolio, as described above
• 10% on the timeliness and quality of your weekly reports (and blog, if you choose to do one)
• 10% on your final oral report

Your grade will be assigned on the quality according to the university grading system, which was, as of 2006, for undergraduates:

and for graduates

Here are some of the courses I've supervised in the past (U=undergraduate, G=graduate). The list isn't necessarily complete. Not only have I likely forgotten a few courses, but I've also purposely left off all of the independent studies courses that are just like regular courses, taken by students that have transferred or studied abroad and need to take a course or two out of sequence.

Fall, 2008

Game Programming (U) — Evan Fishman

Fall, 2007

Enterprise Computing Architecture (U) — Kaniel Yano, Steve Smith, Michael Lovrovich

Scripting Languages (U) — Loren Abrams

Spring, 2007

Scripting Languages (U) — Tim Lambert, Andrés Buritica, Patrick Falls

Fall, 2006

Enterprise Computing Architecture (U) — Andrés Buritica

Spring, 2006

Enterprise Computing Architecture (U) — Matt Werner, Mike Megally

Fall, 2005

The Semantic Web (G) — Paul Bull

Spring, 2005

Wireless Technologies (G) — Joephy Hoang

Internet Technologies (U) — Matt Glaser, Dominick Guzzo, Jason Lake, Derek Springer

Fall, 2004

Firmware Technologies (U) — Mark Kolich

Network Security (G) — Prabhu Anbanathan

Programming Language Semantics (G) — Brian Birmingham

Fall, 2003

Advanced Design Patterns (U) — Chris Kane, Zac Propersi

Spring, 2003

Internet Security (G) — Sinu Ranasinghe

RISC Architecture (U) — Will Ready, Masahji Stewart, George Melika

Spring, 2002

Advanced Three Dimensional Graphics (U) — Joey Davis, Vlad Galyuz

Fall, 2001

Distributed Systems (U) — Bill Hamor

Spring, 2001

Component Technologies (U) — Zach Kuhn

Enterprise Computing (U) — John Sullivan

Microprocessors (G) — Shoki Souri

Database Systems (G) — Shoki Souri

Fall, 2000

Embedded Systems Software (G) — Robert Hayes

Spring, 2000

Windows NT Internals (U) — Dirien Barcenas

Spring, 1999

Realtime Design Patterns (G) — James Sanchez

Fall, 1997

Type Theory and Higher Order Logic (G) — Robert Bauer

Internet Technologies (U) — Caskey Dickson

Spring, 1997

Modal and Temporal Logics (G) — Robert Bauer

Concurrent and Distributed Programming (U) — Neil Rotstan, Tony Shaheen

Three Dimensional Graphics with Open GL (U) — McKay Stewart

Spring, 1996

Compiler Construction II (G) — Lida Soopikian

Spring, 1995

Introduction to Three Dimensional Rendering (U) — Michael Fair

Fall, 1994

Object Oriented Design and Eiffel (G) — David Lacey

Summer, 1994

Topics in Programming Languages: ML (G) — Revital Elitzur

Spring, 1994

Distributed Object-Oriented Databases (G) — Eric Shulman

Fall, 1993

Advanced Compiler Design (G) — Scott Karlin

Topics in Programming Languages: Ada 9X (G) — Jodene Sasine

Summer, 1993

User Interface Design (G) — Nils Sandoy

Spring, 1993

Chaos and Fractal Geometry (G) — David Coca

Fall, 1992

Object Oriented Language Implementation (G) — Dean Allingham

Concurrent Programming in Ada (G) — (G) Dean Allingham

Software Engineering Environments (U) — Masroor Malik

Object Oriented Programming (U) — Masroor Malik

Object Oriented Databases (U) — Elias Kent

Spring, 1990

Functional Programming Languages (U) — Frances Thierot

Spring, 1987

Software Engineering and Ada (U) — Paula Bennett, Tim Prendergast