Augustin Chaintreau

4 HWs: Some proofs in the beginning (all pretty difficult), occasionally a programming question, and then a few short-answer questions at the end that required you to apply some ideas from class to a hypothetical situation (rather easy). There was going to be an essay, but due to disorganization he gave it to us as a bonus assignment...to be done over winter break after the class had ended Midterm: if you looked through the practice midterm carefully you had a decent amount of the material covered. The problem is he has this ridiculous format that involves picking one, multiple, or none of the multiple choice options, and then writing a short justification below of your choices. The short justification did not seem to matter Final: Again, look through the practice midterm carefully and you'll have a lot of it covered. Data Challenge: First one was very tricky, took me probably 17-18 hours total, it's very difficult to know how close you are to a good solution until you get there. Second one was stupidly simple in comparison, required very rudimentary data analysis, as long as you made sure to mention a bunch of topics from class and tie them into your findings then you were fine

5 HWs: 7-10 questions, takes a few hours to complete based on whether you know the material 2 Programming Assignments - both take quite a bit of time. First one was to make a p2p chat app. Second one was to simulate a network and implement routing algorithms with file transfer. Each takes about 2 days to complete if you do nothing else. Not hard conceptually, just a lot of grunt work. Midterm - quite hard Final - really really hard and the room was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers

60% HW - including two large "data challenges" - heavy 15% "Midterm" the last day of class - not difficult 25% Final Project - difficult to do well

Augustin is a very enthusiastic, friendly guy. He goes out of his way to encourage people to speak during class, even as far as to buy apples before class and give them to people who raise their hand and participate in any way. You can respond to one of his questions correctly, incorrectly, you can ask him to repeat the question, you can ask "may I please get an apple", as long as some sound passes between your lips he will give you an apple. This class was much more theoretical than I anticipated. Augustin attempts to summarize papers on sociology, graph theory, social psychology or other topics related to models of large-scale social behavior. Some of the models make sense, for others he makes no attempt to prove that they reflect real-life trends; they simply seem like one person's interpretation of a complicated phenomenon. After giving a bit of intuition for the motivation for the model of the day, he dives into a heavily mathematical proof for all sorts of bounds relating to the proof which can quickly become overwhelming. He often lingers on finishing up algebra for longer than necessary, but then makes overestimates our knowledge of certain statistical / linear algebraic theorems and rushes through parts of the proof that seem to fly over most people's heads. The homeworks usually involve taking the ideas covered in class and generalizing them and proving those general…

Augustin is super-friendly and probably one of the nicest professors in the CS department. Everything else about this class kind of stinks. In this class, you’ll basically learn how the internet works at each layer of the stack. There’s a large discrepancy in the level of understanding imparted via lecture in class and the level of understanding required to do well on the homework and exams. His Comic Sans slider are also sans of deep material. They basically cover the textbook at a highly abstracted level. I just read the slides for exams which turned out to be a big mistake. Augustin is more than willing to go over concepts again for you and answer all your questions. However, he’s too accommodating and ends up not finishing the lecture since he wasted time answering a bunch of not-so-great questions. It would also have been nice if he went over some topics in detail (though he expects that kind of detail in tests) Logistics for this class were a mess. Homeworks and exams took forever to be graded. We had Piazza but didn't get responses for 4-5 days at a time which was frustrating right before deadlines. The TAs were also generally not helpful. HW questions were often poorly worded. The exam is just a bunch of hw questions put together. At the end of the course, you’ll have some idea of how the internet works, but all the material could have probably been covered in a third…

I agree mostly with the reviewer below me. Basically, Augustin is very enthusiastic about the material, teaches energetically, and is fairly approachable in person and happy to discuss research topics. The main issue is the lack of organization. He seems to be a pretty busy researcher, as he had to cancel two classes and was often not reachable by email/Piazza. It seemed like he kept pushing back assignments/the exam. At one point he scheduled a make-up class on a day that we are not scheduled for, and we finally had our midterm the last day of class. Also, the grading scheme was not very clear, and the exact percentages were definitely never announced until he sent us a note at the end of the semester. We got very little direction for the final project, which is basically a very condensed 2-page paper that is supposed to have interesting, novel, and relevant results in a research area. This was by far my lowest grade, but in the end he curved the class quite highly. I would say the workload was quite heavy, relative to how much we learned in lecture. By the way, there's no textbook - only recommended reading from A LOT of papers (some from sociology). Note that this class is very math/theory heavy, so you really need to be comfortable with probabilistic analysis and graph concepts. I came from this background and still sometimes felt challenged. There are also "data challenge…

Not much. The programming assignments are big, but there are only two of them, and the homeworks don't take long.

<Preface> I'm writing this before the first midterm so I won't be biased by how well I do on it (i.e. I think I'll do well, and I don't want that coloring my opinion of a fairly bad class), but if last year's midterm, which we were given as study materials, is anything to go on it'll be comically awful. A good chunk of that midterm dealt with advertising engines' business decisions -- roughly, if they conduct their auction at time X, how does this impact their revenue? -- which has literally nothing to do with networks. In the case of another question, the correct answer was "sledding in Morningside Heights." (Don't ask.) </Preface> I think the core of this review can be summed up in a single sentence: "The lecture slides are in Comic Sans." That fact captures the combination of a) trying a bit too hard to be cool (the professor has a pony tail) and b) totally failing to adhere to normal standards of professionalism. Anyway, on to the review. As others have noted, Chaintreau is an entertaining lecturer but very poorly organized. His assignments are poorly written to the point where virtually every question contains important ambiguities, and important terms and concepts are poorly specified, e.g. we are asked to find property X of a system, but there are multiple conflicting definitions of X and despite repeatedly being asked, the TAs and professor staunchly refuse to pick a p…