Assignments

We plan to give a handful of modest homework assignments to complement and reinforce material taught in the class. You must do the homework problems on your own. Of course you may ask for help and advice from classmates, but the final work that you turn in and all the words used to describe it must be your own.

Homework1 (PDF)

Additional Resources for Homework 1

Some students have asked for pointers to additional material on databases, database modeling and SQL.  Here are some pointers we have used in past years in this class:

Structured Query Language (SQL) and Relational Algebra

Conceptual Modeling & UML

  • Brief Introduction to Conceptual Graphs
  • Conceptual graph examples
  • Paper on tradeoff in the modeling of large clinical databases. Johnson, Stephen B. "Generic Data Modeling for Clinical Repositories." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 3 (5) (Sept-Oct 1996).
  • Introduction to UML  the most commonly used conceptual modeling formalism

Homework 2 (PDF)

Below are files associated with Homework 2:

Homework 3 (PDF)

Homework 3 Addenda

  • Census Data

    The original source of the name frequency tables is the U.S. Census Bureau, at the following address: http://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy.html. The commercial company Hamrick provides an interesting interface that gives geographical distributions of names in the U.S. at http://www.hamrick.com/.

    One way to access the data on Singapore would be to extend the programs you had built for HW2. 
  • Approach to Answering Questions

    Note that many of the questions in this homework ask you to design some method or to estimate something for which none of us is likely to have actual knowledge. I would like you to give actual numerical estimates in order to make sure you have thought through the problem, but you need to explain how you arrived at these in order to let us see your design or deduction process, because we have no way to check the accuracy of the number itself.