CS494/594 -- Lecture Notes

James S. Plank

Class Lecture Notes for 2026

I fill in what I teach after I teach it -- typically, I move it from the previous year to the current year. The order is roughly the same from year to year.

1/20: Pointers on giving research presentations.
1/22: Topcoder SRM 640, D1, 250-Pointer - ChristmasTreeDecoration. There is commentary here on the presentation and slides.
1/22: Topcoder SRM 639, D1, 250-Pointer - AliceGame.
1/27: Topcoder SRM 639, D1, 500-Pointer - BoardFolding
1/27 and 1/29: Jgraph.
2/3: A-Star.
2/5: Topcoder problem: TrianglesContainOrigin
2/5: Leetcode problem #1610: Maximum Number of Visible Points.
2/5: The Plank Random Choosing Algorithm.
2/10: Shell Scripting.
2/10: Leetcode problem #990: Satisfiability of Equality Equations. You solve this with Dijoint Sets. We wrote the solution to this in class. If you want the solution, it's in the "post class announcements" for today in Canvas.
2/12 and 2/17: The tale of the 556 patent.
2/24: Due to an airplane maintenance issue, I will not get back to Knoxville tomorrow until class is over, so there will not be class on 2/24/2026. Instead, I have unlocked Lab 2: The File Allocation Table. I have online lectures for this lab from when I taught those classes asynchronously. Here they are -- you should watch them instead of going to class tomorrow. The directory links won't be correct, but you can figure out the discrepency easily:
- Part 1: File Allocation Tables in General. (7:19)
- Part 2: XXD and the Jdisk simulator. (17:33)
- Part 3: Details of the lab. (40:34)

Class Lecture Notes for 2024

I fill in what I teach after I teach it -- typically, I move it from the previous year to the current year. The order is roughly the same from year to year.

2/8: Dr. Marz taught Rust. Here are two programs binread.rs and primes_parallel.rs.
2/20 & 2/22: Bloom Filters. Module in Canvas if you want to go over it again.
2/27: Min-Hash. An interesting use of hashes, and when theoretical elegance takes a back seat to performance.
2/27: The Topcoder problem "FromToDivisible".
2/29: Dr. Emrich gave a guest lecture on String algorithms for big strings (genomes). Here are his slides: 2024_Emrich.ppt.
3/19: PageRank
3/21: Leetcode problem Palindrome Pairs
3/21, 3/26, 3/28 (even though school was closed) and 4/2: The B-Tree Lab
4/11 The Floyd-Warshall Algorithm and Lab.
4/16 and 4/25: Erasure Coding
4/18: Dr. Huang lectured
4/23: SIMD Instructions, and back to the Floyd-Warshall Algorithm.
4/25: Galois Field Arithmetic

Class Lecture Notes for 2022

10/4, 10/11 and 10/20: Four Interesting Network Flow Problems
11/10: I briefly covered the Rabin-Karp pattern matching algorithm.
11/22: Dr. Jantz lectured on the Row Hammer Bug -- Slides and paper.
12/1: and 12/6: Neuromorphic computing research at Tennessee:
- Our main web page: http://neuromorphic.eecs.utk.edu/.
- Two papers on the software framework: Schuman et al, 2019 and Plank et al, 2018..
- Control applications: Plank et al, 2019
- Input encodings: Schuman et al, 2022, and Schuman et al, 2019.
- The kit: Plank et al, 2022.
- Spiking convolutional networks: Plank et al, 2020.
12/6: Fixing photos with Gimp: Lecture notes here
12/6: Edmonds General Matching Algorithm. Although I didn't discuss this in class, here's a paper that show how the general matching algorithm applies to XOR-based Erasure Codes.

Class Lecture Notes for 2021 that were not taught in 2022

10/21: Dr. Huang guest lectured on Hierarchical Data Structures, Scene Graph and Quaternion. Thank you, Dr. Huang.
11/30: XOR-lists, which are a really clever way to implement doubly linked lists with just one pointer. "Optimizing Systems for Byte-Addressable NVM by Reducing Bit Flipping," by D. Bittman, D. D. E. Long, P. Alvaro and E. L. Miller (Santa Cruz).

Class Lecture Notes for 2020 that were not taught in 2021

10/20: Topcoder SRM 614, D1, 250-Pointer - MinimumSquare
H. Peter Anvin, "The mathematics of RAID-6, 2004-2011.
We didn't get to Edmonds General Matching Algorithm this year, which is a bit of a pity, but we simply didn't have time.

Lectures from 2019 that were not taught in 2020.

10/3 and 10/8: Rust from Dr. Marz
11/7, 11/12 and most of 11/14: Dr. Schuchard talks about cybersecurity. I was only there for his lecture on Zero Knowledge Proofs -- good stuff!

These are lectures that I did in 2018 that I did not do in 2019

9/27: Topcoder SRM 647, D1, 500-Pointer - CtuRobots

These are lectures that I did in 2017 that I did not do in 2018

11/21 and 11/28: Multiplying Matrices, and the Impact of Memory
11/30: Multiplying Matrices with Instruction Level Parallelism
11/30: I also went over Mario Blaum's EVENODD coding scheme, Liping Xiang's paper on performing recovery with fewer disk operations, and my paper on doing erasure coding with fewer XOR's than you'd think..

These are lectures that I did in 2016 that I did not do in 2017

1/21/2016: Topcoder SRM 647, D1, 250-Pointer - BuildingTowersEasy.
3/8 and 3/10/2016: Dr. Jantz gave guest lectures on Garbage Collection

Old Scripting Notes

These are old lecture notes on things that you may find useful for shell scripting, testing and graphing.