Find inspiration in UW, CMU, Stanford research.

Artificial Intelligence
- intelligent transport systems
- swarm computing
- automatic image analysis (image search)
- automatic translation
- voice control
- natural language processing
- get ideas from MIT’s CSAIL

Human-Computer Interfaces
- brain-controlled computers
- gesture interfaces (skinput, sixth sense, Natal)

Ubiquitous Computing
- wearable computers
- “Smart grid” (sensors for electrical, power grids; HydroSense)
- RFID applications (“smart tags”, tracking)

Computing law
- laws regulating privacy
- anti-hacking laws

Large-scale computing
- quantum computing
- parallel computing (multi-core, multi-processor)

Computing Concepts
- Moore’s Law
- Agile Software Design
- Cloud Computing (Google docs, GMail, etc)
- Databases (information storage)
- Peer to peer networking (BitTorrent)
- Encryption

Human-based computation (Captcha)

Computing in the developing world

Android OS
Linux

People in computing
- Edsger Dijkstra (algorithms)
- Alan Turing (father of CS)
- Douglas Engelbart (pioneer, invented the mouse)
- Marissa Mayer (early Google employee)

You will spend this class period completing the flickr exercise and demonstrating what you have learned over the course of the semester.  This is worth 25 project points.  You will do as many of these short programs as you can and will be graded based on completeness, how on-task you are and the appropriateness of the problems you choose to solve.  Aim to demonstrate as much knowledge as you can.

Please make sure there is a comment at the top of your program indicating your name.  Please separate each question with a comment indicating which question you are answering (Novice 1, for example).

For all sample runs below, input is underlined.  You don’t need to underline anything.

Novice

1. Write turtle graphics code that draws an equilateral triangle.
2. Write code that prompts the user for their name then greets them.  Here is an example run of this program:
   What is your name? Bob
   Hello, Bob.
3. Write code that generates three random numbers between 1 and 5, adds them up and prints ‘you win’ if their sum is above 10.
4. Write code that prompts the user for a number and then prints whether that number is within 10 of 100.  Here is an example run of this program:
   Enter a number: 6
   No, 6 is not within 10 of 100.

Proficient

1. Write a program which prompts a user for a line of text.  Your program should split that text into a list and then tell the user whether the first and last items were the same.  Here is an example run of this program:
   Please enter a list of items: bananas planes violins bananas
   Yes, the first and last are the same.
2. Write code which prompts a user to enter a temperature as an integer. Your program will print “it is hot” is the temperature is over 100, “it is cold” if the temperature is under 60, and “it is just right” if the temperature is between 61 and 99 inclusive. The program continues to ask for termperatures, and evaluates them as above, until the user enters a temperature of 0.  Here is an example run of this program:

   Please enter a temperature: 95
   It is just right.
   Please enter a temperature: 110
   It is hot.
   Please enter a temperature: 32
   It is cold.
   Please enter a temperature: 0
   Good bye!

3. Translate the following for loop into a while loop that does the same thing

   for i in range(10):
       print "i = " + str(i)

4. Write code that prompts the user for a total bill amount at a restaurant then displays the total with a 15% tip and a 20% tip.  Here is an example run of this program:
   How much was your meal? 10
   Total with 15% tip:  $11.5
   Total with 20% tip:  $12

Ninja

1. Write code that plays a guessing game with the user.  This time, your program should try to guess what the user is thinking.  A sample run of the program:
   Please think of a number between 1-100 and I will try to guess it.
   Are you thinking of a number between 1-100? yes
   Is it 50? no
   Is it higher than 50? yes
   Is it 75? no
   Is it higher than 75? no
   Is it 62? yes
   I got it in 3 tries!
   Are you thinking of a number between 1-100? no
2. Write code that checks whether the content of a list is a palindrome.  For example ['p', 'e', 'e', 'p'] is a palindrome because it is the same forwards and backwards. (Hint: you may want to first write a function that reverses a list so that you can then use that to check whether the list is the same forwards and backwards)
3. Continue working on the star chart program
4. Look at the zip codes data file and implement some of the features described in this assignment, or come up with your own.
5. If you have a good idea you want to pursue, you may… but make sure you’re demonstrating proficiency and not just getting bogged down in design!

This assignment is designed to give you experience with reading and interpreting existing code while learning about the types of applications made possible by access to online information.

You will need to download flickr.py and wallpaper.py.  Make sure to save them in the same folder.  flickr.py is a library that contains functions to make calls to Flickr.  wallpaper.py is an example of a program using that library.

Run wallpaper.py a couple of times and make sure you understand what it’s doing.  READ THROUGH THE CODE ONCE BEFORE STARTING THE QUESTIONS!

Answer the following questions on a piece of paper to turn in:

1. What is an API? (look it up and make sure you write a definition you understand, not just one you copy!)
2. Give three examples of web-based APIs (other than Flickr).
3. Look on the right side of this page to see the different kinds of information that can be requested from Flickr.  Come up with 2 ideas of little programs you could build (like this wallpaper one) using some of those methods.  Take a look at the app garden for ideas.
4. Notice that both files start with a comment style we haven’t talked about which uses triple quotes (“”").  Why do you think the original authors used this comment style over the one we know? (#)
5. Notice that in wallpaper.py, imports are done differently than the ‘from X import *’ style we know.  Take a minute to look through the file and see if you can figure out what the difference is (look at random since you’re familiar with it).  If you can’t figure it out, read the note found here.  What is an advantage of importing modules the way this program does it as opposed to how we did it?  Why do you think I showed ‘from X import *’ to you first?
6. What does return do? Use context clues if you can’t remember or read a book chapter here.
7. What changes would you make to wallpaper.py to have the resulting image saved as a different file name?
8. What are two ways to make a 3×3 grid of pictures rather than the current 4×4?  Describe the changes necessary.
9. How and why is the split() method used?
10. On line 31 of the wallpaper.py file, a call on the photos_search function of the flickr module is made.  Notice that parameters are passed in differently from what we have learned.  Look in flickr.py to explain why the parameters are passed as tags=tags, per_page=number instead of tags, number
11. The wallpaper.py file defines 4 functions.  Describe what input each takes and what steps it completes in detail (essentially, you should be writing pseudocode for the existing program).
12. How many calls to the Flickr servers does the wallpaper program need to make every time it’s called?  Explain.
13. Describe how comments are used in the flickr.py file.  Are they helpful in understanding the program?

Details

• You will read from two files: names.txt and meanings.txt. You must download them and save them in the same directory as your program.
• • names.txt: each line includes a name followed by 11 decades’ worth of popularity ranking. Notice that a ranking of 1 means the name is the MOST popular. A ranking of 0 means the name was not in the top 1000.
  meaning.txt: each line starts with a name and continues with the name meaning. You can either present this information visually with the data graph or at the command prompt.
• A user’s search should be case insensitive. In other words, a search for ‘MeGaN’ should find and graph the record for ‘Megan.’ You could use, for example, the .title() string method.
• If the user searches for a name not in the files, he or she should get some kind of feedback. This can be ‘sorry, name not found’ at the command prompt or maybe a fail image displayed visually.
• When graphing the data, notice that a ranking of 1 should be at the top of your graph, a ranking of 500 should be in the middle and a ranking of 0 should be at the very bottom. This is a tricky part to deal with. You will want to use a conditional to deal with the 0 special case.
• You can choose what your graph looks like. It must include labels and lines for each decade spaced out at least 50 pixels. You can make a line graph or a bar graph. Below are two acceptable examples (you don’t need to graph more than one name or label each point with the name, but those are possible extensions if you finish early).

Getting started

Things you will need to know

Write with the turtle: write("<text>")

Make a string called search into all uppercase: search = search.upper()

Write a program that reads from the file imdb.txt and searches it for a keyword. The file is organized in the following way:

rank rating votes title (year)

You should ask the user what to search for then display ALL titles that contain that text. Here is a sample run (user input is underlined):

Search word? american
American Beauty (1999) is ranked 35 with a rating of 8.5
American History X (1998) is ranked 41 with a rating of 8.5
American Gangster (2007) is ranked 94 with a rating of 8.2

You should exactly reproduce the format shown above.  In other words, your output should be as follows:
title (year) is ranked ranking with a rating of rating

Notice that the search is case insensitive. The trickiest part will be displaying the entire title. Here is one way to do it:
1. Split each line of input
2. You know that the title always starts at index 3 of the split line
3. Use the string join method. This joins the parts of a list together into a string separated by the string it’s called on.

Here is the code you need:
title = " ".join(tokens[3:])
What this does is squish together all parts of the title into one string separated by spaces.

In the coming days, we will be coming back to lists to perform interesting data manipulation. To ease our way back, let’s do a few list exercises involving robots.

Activity 1: Home movie

Get your robot to film and display a “movie” by storing then showing a list of pictures.  I’ll have shown you the basic idea in lecture but it will be up to you to figure out appropriate timing to get about 10 seconds of video without blurring while your robot is moving.

Activity 2: Note list

You all wrote songs using a series of beeps.  Didn’t that look repetitive?  Create a list of beep frequencies then loop through that list to write a song more efficiently.

Notice that if you only have a list of frequencies, you’re somewhat limited because the length of each beep stays the same.  Write code to use two lists to define a song: one of frequencies and one of beep lengths.

Activity 3: Images as lists of pixels

It can be very useful to think of images as lists of pixels or picture elements, the tiny dots pictures are made of.  Given this view, we can loop over the pixels in an image and manipulate then in certain ways.

We can use two functions, getWidth(<picture>) and getHeight(<picture>) to know what loop bounds to use.  For example, the following code will loop through a picture the robot just took and make a horizontal line 20 pixels from the top of the image green-tinted:

for i in range(getWidth(pic)):
    pixel = getPixel(pic, i, 20)
    setGreen(pixel, 255)
    repaint()

Try it! Notice that the i variable gets values from 0 to the width of the whole picture. We fetch a particular pixel and tint it. In this case, we repaint the image as the line is being drawn. Modify the code to repaint the picture only after the line is drawn.

What if we wanted to tint the whole image?  We need to vary both the x and the y coordinates of the pixel we are fetching.  To do this, we’ll need to nest two for loops, one changing the x coordinate and another modifying the y:

for i in range(getWidth(pic)):
	for j in range(getHeight(pic)):
		pixel = getPixel(pic, i, j)
		setGreen(pixel, 255)
repaint()

In the example above, I repaint only after the whole image is tinted. Change the position of repaint() to change when the image is updated.

What is the 255 business?  Colors of pixels are represented as a combination of red, green and blue.  Each color can have a value between 0-255.  In this case, we are asking the computer to make each pixel in the image have as much green as possible.  Experiment with different values of green.

Can you tint the video you made in the first exercise?

Robots are one of those things we all think we know something about but that are surprisingly difficult to define.  Broadly, a robot is a program that runs automatically without a human needing to interfere.  Robots have logic of varying complexity that allow it to react to different situations on its own.  Given this definition, a robot doesn’t technically need to be a physical machine like the Wall-Es and Transformers found in movies.  One type of robot all of us depend on without necessarily realizing it is a webcrawler which indexes web content automatically to make search engines like Google possible.

For the next few days, we’ll be learning to program the Scribbler robots.  These are simple little “tank” robots that have a number of sensors including a color camera, infrared sensors and light sensors.  Our computers will connect to them using bluetooth which is short-range and reasonably fast.

I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO CHECK OUT SAMPLE PROGRAMS!

In order to start using your robot, you have to make sure that your bluetooth dongle is connected to the computer.

You will need to click on the desktop icon that says ‘Python for ROBOTS.’

Once IDLE loads up, type in these commands:

from myro import *
init("com3") # or whatever com port your bot has

Unfortunately, the com port seems to change all the darn time.  In order to find it for your particular connection, you will need to right-click on the bluetooth icon in the system tray then select ‘Add bluetooth device.’  Find the serial number of your robot, click next, then you should use whatever outgoing com port is displayed in your call on the init function.

Your screen should look like the following:

You should get a popup asking you to accept the bluetooth communication.  Click on it:

You should then be asked for a bluetooth passkey.  Type in 1234 as follows:

To personalize your robot, you can give it a name.  For example, to name a robot “Terminator”

>>> setName(”Terminator”)

You are now ready to send commands to your robot!  For today, I want us to make sure there are no technical hurdles and then experiment with some of the basic commands.  To start, try typing in joyStick() and use the mouse to direct your robot around the room.  How far can it get before it is out of range?  Make sure you’re doing this on the floor so your bot doesn’t fall off the table!!

Your robot can produce songs!  This is going to get pretty annoying, but it’s in the name of learning, right?  Each group is going to write a robot song.  The basic idea is that you will be using a beep command.  Try this:

>>> beep(1, 440)

You should have heard a tone play for 1 second at 440Hz.  Hz?  Hertz is a mesure of frequency.  beep is a function that creates waves at specified frequencies.  It turns out that 440 is the frequency of an A.  Try creating a beep at a higher frequency:

>>> beep(1, 800)

It sounds higher-pitched, right?  The human ear can hear roughly between 20 Hz – 20 kHz.  Can you hear a beep(1, 20000)?  What about beep(1, 20)?

In order to create your song, you will create a function.  For example, I will call mine mySong.  Here is what my code looks like:

I encourage you to download robotsong.py (just click on the link at left or on the calendar) and play it yourself.  To play the song, go to ‘Run Module’ as follows:

When you are ready to write your own robot song, go to ‘File > New Window’ and get a new program file.  Save it using a descriptive name of your choice and make sure it has .py at the end!

Once you’ve written your song, explore the following functions and complete the questions at the end.  Keep in mind that all the Python you already know still applies!

pic = takePicture()
show(pic)

grayPic = takePicture("gray")
show(grayPic)

>>> senses()

>>> getLight('left')
>>> getLight(0)
>>> getLight('center')
>>> getLight(1)
>>> getLight('right')
>>> getLight(2)

>>> getIR('left')
>>> getIR('right')
>>> getIR(0)
>>> getIR(1)

# make the 'bot print a message and go forward for 10 seconds.
while(timeRemaining(10)):
    print "Gogogo!"
    forward(1) # this makes your 'bot go forward at full speed forever!  Until the stop() command is called.
stop()

Please take your time going over the list tutorial and the first set of exercises.  Once you are comfortable with those, take a look at the advanced list examples and move on to these.

As usual, please jump around as you wish.

Activity 1: Magic Eight Ball (Jason’s idea!!)

Create a program that prompts the user for a question then gives a magic eight ball answer.  Your program should randomly pick an answer from a list of choices.  Feel free to use the standard answers listed on the Wikipedia article or to make up your own creative ones.  Your program should keep asking the user for questions until he or she types “exit.”

This is one that can easily be expanded.  You could use Turtle Graphics to show a visual representation of the Eight Ball.  You could  report how many positive and negative answers were given.

Activity 2: Temperature Conversion

Remember writing a temperature conversion function?  Either dig it out or write it again.  Your program should start with a list of temperatures in Celsius, should convert them to Fahrenheit and store the results in a second list then print out both lists.

Activity 3: Multiplication table

Prompt the user for a number.  Use the range function to print out a multiplication table for numbers between 0 and the desired bound.

Activity 4: Dice statistics

Write a program to roll a die 200 times then report how many 1s, 2s, 3s, etc were rolled.  Draw a histogram of the data using Turtle Graphics.

Activity 5: Cards

Write as short of a program as possible to generate a list of all 52 cards in a standard card deck.  You can choose how to represent cards.  I recommend doing something like building strings that first have the rank then the suit.  For example, the list might start with ["1club", "2club", "3club", ... "kingclub"...]  Then, shuffle the resulting deck and print it out.