Vorlesungszusammenfassung der Vorlesung Rechnerstrukturen am KIT von Prof. Dr. Karl, gehalten von Dr. Lars Bauer, und Übungen gehalten von Thomas Becker. Die Klausur hat typischerweise einen hohen Anteil an Wissensfragen und die Bearbeitungszeit ist sehr knapp.
Software Engineering 2 (SWT II) is the follow-up lecture to Software Engineering 1 and is held by Prof. Dr. Reussner. It focuses on software architecture, quality and development processes. The first part of this post is a lecture summary organized as self-test questions for active recall. Below there are answers to the learning goals presented in the last lecture.
Lecture summary of the lecture “Privacy Enhancing Technologies” at KIT, organized as self-test toggles for active recall. The lecture starts with what privacy actually means, from privacy models to the GDPR, and then covers techniques to protect it: anonymous communication networks like mixes and DC-nets, privacy metrics, statistical disclosure control, differential privacy, and privacy for trajectory data. Many answers are figures from the lecture slides, so the toggles work best as a quick check during exam preparation.
Ethereum smart contracts are Turing complete programs that operate on money and derived assets. With a market capitalization in the three digit billions, there is an interest in quantifying their usage. Despite blockchain data being public by design, large scale analysis of smart contracts is technically challenging. We summarize methods to analyze contract usage on the Ethereum blockchain and categorize the most popular contracts by their application domain and behavior. Especially, changes in behavior before and after the reduction of gas refunds on the Ethereum blockchain are analyzed. Furthermore, we quantify the adoption of final Ethereum Requests for Comments (ERCs), which standardize smart contracts for certain applications. According to the used metrics, trading related smart contracts are the most popular. In that context, we explain why using just a single metric can be misleading. The reduction of gas refunds led to significant changes in contract lifetime and state cleanup.
The lecture Machine Learning for the Natural Sciences promises to focus on applications of machine learning to natural sciences, especially physics and chemistry. However, most of the actual content is repeating machine learning basics that are already covered in foundational lectures on machine learning. In the remaining time, a few interesting topics are presented, but sadly just very shallowly.
There is no such thing as the perfect university exam, but if we agree that its purpose is to give an objective score of an individual’s comprehension of the covered topics, then there is clearly a way to be less wrong when creating exams. This post lists a few DON’Ts that can be easily avoided. If you think there is an anti-pattern missing from this post, you can write me an email and I will add it here.
Lecture summary of the lecture Operating System Security, organized with self-test toggles. The lecture is concerned with binary exploitation from an offensive as well as a defensive point of view. I can really recommend the lecture if you are interested in modern security mechanisms implemented by operating systems and hardware.
Answers to self-test questions for the lecture “Data Science I” at KIT. If you spot any errors, write me an e-mail or Discord message.
Self-test questions for the lecture “Machine Learning - Foundations and Algorithms” at KIT.