Coursework office hour

15 October 2010

There are no lectures next week, and you should work on your coursework investigation. If you have questions or problems you wish to raise, you can bring them to me on Wednesday afternoon.

Office Hour: 2-3pm Wednesday 20 October, Informatics Forum 5.04, Ian Stark

If the turnstile gates are closed and your student card does not open them, ask at the front desk for admission.

Otherwise, please post any questions here on the blog or by email either to the mailing list apl-students@inf.ed.ac.uk or to me Ian.Stark@ed.ac.uk.


Microsoft Software licences available

3 October 2010

The School of Informatics has a subscription to the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDN AA). This means that we can offer licensed copies of a range of Microsoft packages. These are for “development” rather than “productivity” tools: Windows 7 and Visual Studio rather than Word and Excel. You can make arbitrary non-commercial use of these while studying here.

In particular, if your chosen coursework topic requires setting up one or more virtual machines running Windows, this can help.

If you would like an MSDN account to download the software and licence keys, send me an email.

Links: Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance; Student Use Agreement.


Lecture 4: Coursework Assignment Topics

1 October 2010

Presentation of the five coursework topics. Some good and bad examples of referencing. Requirements of preliminary report; investigation; and final report. Notes on working practices: aims of homework, exercises, coursework; avoiding plagiarism.

You need to commit to a topic choice by next Friday. This involves finding and reading references, as well as downloading, installing and running your chosen system. If you have difficulties with this, post a question below.

Links: Slides; Sheet; Coursework assignment; University marking scheme; Essay grade descriptors.


Coursework Assignment

24 September 2010

The assessed coursework for APL is to research and write a report on one of the following topics:

  • Information flow in Jif
  • Programming the web with Links
  • Parallel programming in Haskell with par and seq
  • Asynchronous workflows in F#
  • Functional reactive programming in Flapjax

Preparing your report will involve reading research papers, technical manuals, and some code development on the system in question. Further details are available from the coursework webpage, including some examples of previous reports.

The lecture next Friday will review the assignment topics, and give information on preparing your report, its content and arrangement.

Homework

Do some basic research into each of the topics, in preparation for next Friday. Find out what you can, and consider which one most interests you. The lecture on Friday is a chance ask further questions about the topics, and any other issues that concern you. You can also post questions here on the blog, or by email to the lecturers.

Link: Coursework instructions