Courses Taught at SBU by T.Pittman

SBU policy is that they own the course syllabi; other material is the property of the instructor who prepared it. Accordingly, most of the links on this page refer to material available here on my site, but all syllabi links were to the SBU site, which have since disappeared. Most of those syllabi link to other documents which have already been moved to here, so they are appropriately linked from here.

"No complex information system ever evolved by the accumulation of random events; every complex information system is the product of design for a purpose."

A computer [program] is a complex information system, and it must be designed. The courses here are about design.
 

Spring 2004:

CIS-1141, Intro to Unix
CIS-1144, CS1 (Programming in Java)
CIS-4423, Operating Systems

Fall 2003:

CIS-1154, Computer Science 2 (Java)
CIS-2233, Machine Organization (Hardware and assembly language)
CIS-3333, Advanced Data Structures (Programming in C++)
CIS-4951, Competitive Programming (preparation for the ACM contest)

Spring 2003:

CIS-3113, GUI  Graphical User Interface (GUI) Application Development (core)
CIS-3353, PL+AI  Survey of Programming Languages and Artificial Intelligence (core)

CIS-4953, Compiler Design (special topic) This is your only chance in the known future to pick up the one course in this department where the instructor literally "wrote the book", which is also an extension of his PhD research. Pittman is passionate about grammar-based translator design (see also BibleTrans). Using appropriate tools, you can write a simple compiler in a few hours, and a productive real-world translator in a few days. Because this is a special topics course, it is not known when it will be offered again at SBU.

Fall 2002:

CIS-1123, Fortran
CIS-1144, CS1
CIS-2233, Machine Organization

Research Area: Computational Linguistics (Semantics)

Linguistics is the study of language, and semantics is the subfield concerned with meaning. In computer science we are particularly concerned with accurately translating the meaning of an abstract problem solution into a formal computer language, and secondarily with accurately translating that formal representation of meaning into electronic steps performed by physical hardware to do the specified job correctly. Two of the courses on my schedule above (CIS-1123 and CIS-1144) address the first concern, and the third course (CIS-2233) addresses the second. These courses will be taught from that perspective.

More than any other religion, Christians are also concerned with accurate translation of our founding documents, first from Greek and Hebrew into a language the people understand, and then more importantly into thoughts and actions worthy of servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. For additional information on computational linguistics in connection with Bible translation, see my BibleTrans web site. Some of the debate topics (now in the Essays section) are also about translation issues. These represent my effort to integrate faith and discipline in a manner consistent with the policy of SBU; they are not a part of any formal instruction. If you disagree with any of the opinions expressed there, please feel free to make your own contribution.

Tom Pittman, Fall 2002


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Rev. 2008 July 30