Faculty of Computer Science
Free University of Bolzano/Bozen

Diego Calvanese - Teaching

Office hours

Typically: Friday - 17:00-19:00 (since I travel frequently, students are advised to ask for confirmation, either during lectures, or in the MS Teams chat).
Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen,
Piazza Domenicani 3, 2nd floor left, Room 2.07.

Announcements

Unfortunately, I receive too many emails, and it often happens that I am not even able to see (hence read) all emails that I receive. Therefore, students are advised to contact me via the MS Teams chat (rather than via email), since the MS Teams chat is (still) less crowded and hence easier to monitor. In any case, if I do not react (either to an email or to a message on Teams) within two days, it is likely that I have missed it and that I might not react at all. In that case, please write/message me again, so that the email/message gets pushed up in the inbox/Teams chat.

Sono venuto a conoscenza che diversi studenti che studiano il linguaggio C trovano ancora utili un insieme di dispense ed esercizi che avevo preparato ancora nel 2001 per un Corso di Fondamenti di Informatica nell'ambito del Corso di Laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica dell'Università di Roma "La Sapienza". Dal momento che la pagina del corso e quella contenente il materiale didattico non sono facilmente raggiungibili (anche se, a quanto pare, Google le trova senza problemi), le ho messe meglio in evidenza qui:
- pagina del corso di Fondamenti di Informatica basato sul linguaggio C
- pagina con i lucidi delle lezioni e gli esercizi in C svolti
Faccio notare che purtroppo i link ai programmi C presenti nei file pdf dei lucidi non sono più aggiornati. Inoltre, l'infrastruttura LaTeX che avevo usato a suo tempo per generare quei pdf non è più funzionante, quindi non sono in grado di rigenerare i file pdf con i link corretti. Tuttavia, tutti i programmi C sono accessibili dalla stessa pagina in cui si trovano i lucidi, e sono identificati da cartella e nome. Quindi, dovrebbe essere abbastanza facile localizzare il file giusto.

Courses

A.Y. 2023/2024
A.Y. 2022/2023
A.Y. 2021/2022
A.Y. 2020/2021
A.Y. 2019/2020
A.Y. 2018/2019
A.Y. 2017/2018
A.Y. 2016/2017
A.Y. 2015/2016
A.Y. 2014/2015
A.Y. 2013/2014
A.Y. 2011/2012
A.Y. 2010/2011
A.Y. 2009/2010
A.Y. 2008/2009
A.Y. 2007/2008
A.Y. 2006/2007
A.Y. 2005/2006
A.Y. 2004/2005
Past courses taught at the Facoltà di Ingegneria of the University of Rome "La Sapienza" (in Italian)

Notes

Students are strongly encouraged to make use of the office hours for any question they may have regarding the courses I am teaching (lectures, syllabi, exams, etc.), or for projects. They can also contact me via MS Teams (preferred), by phone, or by email to arrange for an office hour outside the regular schedule. Unfortunately, however, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to respond to emails. Therefore, if I have not responded to a request within 2 days, most likely I have missed the email and will not have the chance to see it again in the list of emails in my inbox. Students are then encouraged to either contact me on MS Teams, or to resend me the unanswered email.

Answering questions on the course contents via email is typically rather time-consuming; therefore, such kinds of questions will be answered only if the following two conditions are satisfied:
1. The answer to the question is relatively short.
  E.g., the request "Please send me back a Turing Machine that solves the following problem <50 page problem specification follows>" will not be answered.
2. The answer can be determined in a relatively short amount of time.
  E.g., the question: "Does the given Turing Machine correctly solve the following problem? <50 page problem specification and listing of transitions of 2000 state TM follow>" will not be answered.
Please notice that condition 1 above does not necessarily imply condition 2. E.g., the answer to the question "Is P = NP?" could be typed using either 2 or 3 characters; nevertheless, hundreds of mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists have not been able to provide such an answer despite several decades of efforts. Also, although this might seem to contradict well-known results in computational complexity, item 2 does not necessarily imply item 1. The reason is that the answer to a question might just follow immediately from standard results or techniques, but nevertheless might require a lengthy explanation to be useful to a student. In all such cases, a chat during office hours is much more efficient, effective, and convenient, both for the student and for myself.
All questions that do not satisfy conditions 1 and 2 have to be asked either during office hours, or after the lectures.
Note that the request: "Does the given Turing Machine correctly solve the following problem? <50 page problem specification and listing of transitions of 2000 state TM follow>" will not be answered in any case :-).
Computer scientists have to be concerned with efficiency. Asking questions for which an answer is already provided in the web pages is inefficient for everybody (for the student, since they have to write the question and wait for an answer, and for me, since I already provided the answer in the web pages, and have to repeat it). Therefore it is in general a good idea to read the web pages. If you reached this point, you are already well on track :-)

Due to the increasing amount of spam, I follow the standard practice of discarding without reading anonymous emails, i.e., emails that are not explicitly signed with the full name of the sender.

home page of Diego Calvanese.