Spring 2022 Computer Science 458 Introduction

Video of the Day

zoom poll regarding Bertrand Russell.

Lecture: 1/26/2022

• Biography. Hybrid: academia (theory) / industry (practice).
  • Yale undergraduate. music major.
  • Developed computer systems for presidential campaigns and the White House, introducing electronic mail to campaigns and the internet to the White House.
  • Yale graduate student, M.S., Ph.D., computer science (artificial intelligence)
  • Yale Computer Science Department: Assistant Chairman, Assistant Director of the Yale AI Project, Lecturer.
  • Connected Yale to the Internet.
  • NYU Stern School of Business, Department of Information Systems, Assistant Professor.
  • Wrote three books (T/Scheme, LISP, decision making)
  • Developed investment and risk technology systems for Wall Street. Sell side (Morgan Stanley), Buy side (INVESCO, Bank of America, Commonfund)
• Syllabus
• Ned Deming.
  • Advised Japan how to recover after World War II. Focus on quality.
  • See "System of Profound Knowledge."
  • "Quality is free."
  • Opposed ranking employees or students. vs HBS failure rule.
  • Avoid merit pay - discourages cooperation.
  • Deming was my colleague at NYU Business School.
  • Deming said that most courses could be viewed as the professor handing out marbles in every lecture, and then giving an exam in which he asks for the marbles back from the students.
  • In this course, I will at times hand out marbles, but I will expect the students to think on their own and give me marbles I never saw before. Better said: I will give you bricks which you will use to build something new.
• Guest speakers. In the past, we had speakers from finance, Google, Facebook, Palentir, MIT, and elsewhere. We have permission to invite speakers and take them out to dinner - usually at Mory's. Some may want to recruit as well. I have started lining up speakers. I have one from Facebook and one from Citadel. I welcome suggestions from the class.
• Complete the online student information sheet.
• We will be using Python. If you don't already know it, you should be able to pick it up quickly. See the Google's Python Class and the books in the syllabus. Python question: what is a lambda list comprehension?
• One more thing. Some of the assignments will involve statistics and finance. We do not expect you to know statistics and finance or economics. After all, this is a computer science course. We will provide that information.

We will meet this Friday, January 28

The Realm of Decisions

• What is a correct decision? See A Realistic Model of Rationality. This paper provides a high-level introduction to the topics we will discuss in this course: goals, plans, resources, relationships, goal adoption, explanations, subjective decisions, emotions, advice, and persuasion. We want to develop a theory that can be implemented in a computer program.
• For discussion in next class: draft reasons for and against each of the following:
  • Getting a tattoo.
  • Getting a covid vaccine.
  We assume that you have relationships with a variety of people: family, friends, colleagues, classmates, etc. Also discuss who among them will be affected by your choice, either positively or negatively.
• Introduction to Decision Making