General note: Often we get a large number of inquiries about course registration, the waitlist, pre-reqs, and waivers. Unfortunately we are not able to respond to all these requests in a timely manner: unlike the techniques and technologies we teach in CS 6240, the instructor cannot parallelize himself. This means that during particularly busy times of research, student advising, course preparation, and university service, the instructor simply cannot keep up with the flood of incoming emails, Teams messages, Slack messages, and so on. We apologize for this in advance.
I am a PhD student in CS, ECE, or a closely related field with good algorithms and programming background. Can I take the course?
Yes, we can generally waive the pre-reqs for PhD students like you. If you are not sure, contact me directly.
I am a Masters student whose curriculum includes a graduate-level algorithms course like CS 5800 or ECE 7205. I would like to take CS 6240 before (or concurrently with) that algorithms course. Can I get a waiver for the algorithms pre-req?
Usually not, because we do not have the time and resources to carefully check your level of preparation for CS 6240. We want to make sure that you will be ready to succeed, and this requires a solid background in algorithms. Since you need to take a graduate-level algorithms course anyway, we ask that you take that course early on, so that you are ready for CS 6240 and do not need a waiver.
We understand that sometimes there are special circumstances. In that case, contact me and briefly explain your situation (explain clearly why you cannot take the algorithms course before taking CS 6240). For a waiver, we look at your GPA here at Northeastern (it should be near 4.0), in particular for related courses like databases, machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval.
I took an algorithms course as an undergraduate student. Isn't that enough for waiving the algorithms pre-req?
It should be, but in our experience actual working knowledge of algorithms material varied. For that reason we introduced the pre-reqs, because we want you to succeed. If you took the undergraduate-level algorithms course recently at a university the instructor is familiar with (which typically means it is a research university in the US or top-tier university in another country), and you received a very good grade in that course, then we may consider a waiver.
I am a Masters student whose curriculum does not require a graduate-level algorithms course like CS 5800 or ECE 7205. Can I get a waiver for the algorithms pre-req?
Please contact me and explain your situation. We want to make sure that you will be ready to succeed, and this requires a solid background in algorithms. For a waiver, we look at your GPA here at Northeastern (it should be near 4.0), in particular for related courses like databases, machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. In addition, we may consider a waiver if you took an undergraduate-level algorithms course recently at a university the instructor is familiar with (which typically means it is a research university in the US or top-tier university in another country), and you received a very good grade in that course.
The course title and description do not mention MapReduce, Spark, etc. What technologies will be covered?
We did not include specific technologies in course title and description, so that we can react to the changing technology landscape without having to repeatedly update the Registrar information. The course teaches distributed algorithms for big-data processing, which can be implemented in many different languages and platforms. Currently we work with Hadoop MapReduce and Spark.
Where can I find more info about the course, including syllabus and course content?
Take a look at the latest instance of the course here.