Data Structures and Algorithms for Engineers

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|CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY IN RWANDA|

Under Development ...

Note: This syllabus is based mainly on Course 04-630 Computer Science Principles for Practicing Engineers given by Mel Rosso-Llopart and Anthony J. Lattanze at Carnegie Mellon University. Proposals for material to be deprecated are set in italics; proposals for new material are set in boldface.

04-630
Data Structures and Algorithms for Engineers

Course discipline: TBD

Core

Units: 12

Lecture/Lab/Rep hours/week: 4 hours lectures/week, 1.5 hours labs/week (two sessions), 1 hour recitation/week (two sessions)

Semester: Spring

Pre-requisites: programming skills

Students are expected to be familiar with programming in at least one programming language. Formal programming language training is not required. Students may not have any formal background in algorithms, data structures, analysis, or detailed design techniques and methods.

Course description:

Many organizations today are incorporating computer hardware and software into the products that they design and build. Most of these organizations' primary competencies are not computer science or software engineering, but rather they find that automation makes their products smarter, more capable, and more appealing in the market place. Because deep domain knowledge is needed to build these products, these organizations often hire engineers from traditional engineering disciplines to design and build the product platform, in many cases requiring them to write software to make the product actually work. These are capable engineers from many disciplines other than software engineering and unfortunately they usually learn software engineering on the job. This process typically involves considerable trial and error and often results in poorly designed and documented systems, defect laden software, bloated product development costs, unmaintainable software, and missed opportunities to leverage software development investments.

In addition to developing mere functionality, some application domains are often highly constrained and unforgiving in their quality attribute needs such as performance, safety, and availability. These systems intimately depend upon software to provide these capabilities in addition to basic functionality. Designing software intensive systems with these properties in a cost-effective way requires first-class computer science and software engineering expertise. While many practicing engineers often have many years of industrial experience writing software applications, many lack a formal background in computer science principles. These engineers may have had a few courses or technical training in specific computer languages or technologies, but in general they often lack formal training in algorithms, computing theory, data structures, and design among other key topics. The result is that many of these engineers are not fully realizing their potential as software engineers. This course is designed to bridge these gaps in formal computer science training.

Learning objectives:

The primary objective of the course is to provide engineers without formal training in computer science, a solid background in the key principles of computer science, in general, and of the algorithms and data-structures, in particular. The key purpose of this course is to complement the experience that engineers may already have in writing software with formal computer science underpinnings, making those engineers more capable in developing software intensive systems.

The course begins by considering the main phases of the software development lifecycle, from requirements elicitation, to computational modelling, system specification, software design, implementation, and software quality assurance, including various forms of testing, verification, and validation. Then, building on the concept of abstract data types, the course provides an in in-depth treatment of the key elements of algorithms and data-structures, beginning with the fundamentals of searching, sorting, lists, stacks, and queues, but quickly progressing to more advanced topics, including trees, graphs, and algorithmic strategies. It also covers the analysis of the performance and tractability of algorithms, finishing with automata theory and computability theory. A key focus of the course is on effective implementation and good design principles.

Outcomes:

After completing this course, students should be able to:

  • Recognize and analyze critical computational problems in the course of their work, generate alternative solutions to problems, and assess their relative merits.
  • Understand, analyze, and characterize those factors that influence algorithmic computational performance and memory consumption.
  • Design, implement, and document appropriate, effective, and efficient data structures & algorithms for a variety of real-world problems.
  • Understand detailed software structures and their underlying strengths and weaknesses.
  • Perform detailed, code-level design and document the design in an understandable way.

Content details:

Refer to the Lecture Plan for information on course delivery, including lectures, labs, assignments, and exercises.

The course will cover the following topics (yet to be reordered):

  • Motivation and Preview
  • Fundamental Algorithmic Strategies
  • Algorithmic Representation & Analysis
  • Correctness Analysis
  • Measurement
  • ADT Introduction and Design
  • Lists
  • Stacks
  • Queues
  • List Sorting
  • ADT Trees
  • Heaps
  • Graphs
  • Hashing
  • Software Design
  • Operating Systems
  • Secondary Storage / File Management
  • Software documentation
  • Software development lifecycle
  • Software specification and design
  • Software implementation best practice
  • Component based software engineering

The detailed content for each of these topics follows.


Introduction

  • Goals of the course
  • History of computer science
  • Topic areas
  • Preview of course material
  • Course mechanics
  • Overview of labs, assignments, and exercises
  • Assignment software development platform and tools

Fundamental Algorithmic Strategies

  • Definition of an algorithm
  • Algorithmic analysis and complexity
  • Classes of algorithms
  • Brute force, divide and conquer, branch and bound, dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, recursion, approximation, heuristics and heuristic algorithms, probabilistic algorithms

Algorithmic Representation and Analysis

  • Modelling software
  • Representation, communication, and analysis of algorithms
  • Relational modelling
  • State modelling
  • Pseudo code
  • Flow charts
  • Finite state machines
  • UML
  • Predicate logic
  • Analysis

Correctness Analysis

  • Types of software defects
  • Code module design
  • Syntactic, semantic, logical defects
  • (Semi-)formal verification: partial vs. total correctness
  • Invariant assertion method
  • Simple proof strategies: by contradiction, counterexample, induction
  • Dynamic testing: unit tests, test harness, stubs, drivers, integration testing, regression testing.
  • Static tests: reviews, walkthroughs, inspections, reviewing algorithms and software
  • Pair programming
  • Verification and validation strategies
  • Software quality assurance metrics

Measurement

  • Complexity analysis
  • Big O notation
  • Recursion: runtime memory implications.
  • Recursive vs. iterative solutions

ADT Introduction and Design

  • Vector example exercise
  • History of abstraction
  • Abstract Data Types (ADT)
  • Information hiding
  • Types and typing
  • Encapsulation
  • Efficiency
  • Correctness
  • Checks for pre-conditions and post-conditions
  • Design practices

Lists

  • Basic operations
  • Implementation with arrays and linked lists in pseudo-code
  • Singly linked lists
  • Doubly linked lists
  • Performance considerations

Stacks

  • Stack (LIFO): push, pop, peek, size, numItems operations
  • Array implementation in pseudo-code (directly and array of pointers to data)
  • Stack applications, including evaluation of infix, prefix, and postfix expressions

Queues

  • Queue (FIFO): enqueue, dequeue, peek, size, numItems operations
  • Array implementation in pseudo-code (directly and array of pointers to data)
  • Linked list implementation in pseudo-code
  • Circular queues
  • Performance considerations
  • Deque


List Sorting

  • In-place sorts: bubblsort (efficient and inefficient), selection sort, insertion sort.
  • Not-in-place sorts: quicksort, merge sort.
  • Complexity analysis
  • Characteristics of a good sort
  • Speed, consistency, keys, memory usage, length & code complexity, stability
  • Other sorts ordered by complexity


Trees

  • Concepts and terminology.
  • Types of tree: binary, binary search, B-tree, 2-3 tree, AVL, Red-Black
  • Introduction to binary trees: insertion and deletion
  • Tree traversals: inorder, preorder, postorder
  • AVL trees
  • Non-search trees: parse trees, array implementation, linked list implementation
  • Forests

Heaps

  • Heap basics
  • Types of heap: min heaps and max heap
  • Heap characteristics
  • Heap operations: delete max/min, down heap, up heap, merge, construct, heapify; complexity of operations
  • Priority queues
  • Operating systems heaps
  • Implementation of heap
  • Heap sort (pseudo-code)
  • d-ary heaps
  • Leftist heaps

Graphs

  • Type and definitions
  • Euler's theorem
  • Directed and undirected graphs
  • Array representation
  • Graph traversal: breadth-first and depth-first, uses of.
  • Graph representation
  • Vertex operations and classic problems
  • Adjacency list representation and operations: insert edge & insert vertex
  • Depth-first search and maze traversal (pseudo-code)
  • Spanning trees and minimum spanning trees, Kruskal's algorithm (pseudo-code), Prim's algorithm (pseudo-code)
  • Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm (pseudo-code)
  • Graphs problems: routes, Hamilton paths, network flows, covering problems, museum guard problem
  • Fleury's Euler circuit algorithm

Hashing

  • Using keys to address data
  • Mappings: injection, surjection, bijection
  • Map ADT
  • Hash functions
  • Hash tables: current value tables, direct access tables
  • Managing collisions: chaining, overflow areas, re-hashing, linear probing, quadratic probing
  • Evaluating hash functions: prime division, mid-square, folding, load factor
  • Example application: dictionaries
  • Generating hash functions and using hash structures

Software Design

  • Static, dynamic, physical structures
  • Abstract vs. physical structures
  • Architectural design: components of design, internal vs external aspects, history of design
  • Top down design and structured design
  • Yourdon Structured Analysis: data flow diagrams (DFD), data dictionaries, process specification, entity relationship (ER) diagrams, state transition diagrams
  • Structured vs. object-oriented design
  • OO programming; classes; type, operational and functional polymorphism; inheritance, attributes, methods, instantiations, abstract classes, object-oriented languages
  • OO design methodology: UML class diagram, composite-structure diagram, architecture diagram, package diagram, object diagram, component diagram, deployment diagram, activity diagram, sequence diagram, communication diagram, interaction diagram, timing diagram, use case diagram, state machine diagram
  • OO design principles: open/close principle, design by contract principle, dependency inversion principle, other design principles, documentation

Operating Systems

  • Types of operating system (OS), history of OS
  • Computer hardware
  • Operating system concepts
  • Process mode
  • Thread model
  • Scheduling: batch and interactive
  • Deadlock: modelling, recovery
  • Memory management: swapping, virtual memory, paging
  • Input/output: memory mapped, DMA, interrupts, device drivers
  • File management: disks, file structure, directory structure
  • Multiprocessors: synchronization, RPCs, distributed systems
  • Security

Secondary Storage / Files Management

  • Secondary storage and disk storage
  • Buffering techniques
  • Files: meta-data, flat files, indexed files, hash indexed files
  • Databases: relational databases, hierarchical databases, NoSQL databases
  • Compression strategies, dictionary algorithm, LZ algorithm
  • File structure strategies.







Faculty:

David Vernon

Delivery:

Face-to-face.

Students assessment:

This course includes several hands-on programming and analysis assignments. Students will program mainly in C/C++. The programming assignments include individual assignments and a team capstone project in teams of 2-3 people. In addition to programming assignments, students will be assigned readings to support the lecture material.

Marks will be awarded as follows.

Individual Assignments 50% Final Capstone Project 40% (The capstone project will be completed in 2-3 person teams). Instructor Judgement 10% (We will use time tracking and observation to determine this part of the grade).

Software requirements:

We will use Microsoft Visual C++ Express compiler, version 10.0 (also known as Visual C++ 2010) and CMake running on Windows 7 (64 bit).

A complete software installation guide will be provided in due course.

Course texts:

Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing, Third Edition, David Harel and Yishai Feldman.

Data Structures and Algorithms, Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman, and John E. Hopcroft.

A selection of papers and readings will be provided to complement these required textbooks.


Acknowledgments:

This syllabus is based mainly on Course 04-630 Computer Science Principles for Practicing Engineers given by Mel Rosso-Llopart and Anthony J. Lattanze at Carnegie Mellon University.

Additional topics and teaching material have been taken from Course CS-CO-412 Algorithms and Data Structures given by David Vernon at the Innopolis University.

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