Data Networks

Dear Students,

We hope that all of you enjoyed the Data Networks course! As the new semester is slowly approaching, we would like to invite you to our topics presentation for follow-up work on Tuesday, September 1st, at noon CEST. We will discuss next semester's seminar, concrete projects ideas on which you might want to work on, as well as potential topics for your bachelor/master thesis. If you are interested, please join:

Meeting invitation: https://zoom.us/j/97041897044?pwd=NXZicUlLSVA1TzdDcFZrQVR0cmM3UT09
Meeting ID: 970 4189 7044
Passcode: 212011

The Session will be recorded. We will repeat a similar session few weeks before the next semester.

Dear Students,

We will provide an additional Q&A to answer all your exam related question (regardless of topic) at Monday, July 20 at 2 p.m. CEST. If you want to make sure that your question is covered, please sent an email with the topic "[Q&A Questions]" to inet-teaching@lists.mpi-inf.mpg.de before Saturday morning. The more questions we receive beforehand, the better we can structure the Q&A. If we receive too many questions, we will select the most important ones for the exam. You will be able to find the Zoom invitation in the Q&A table later this week.

Dear Students,

For those of you that did not receive an invite for the oral exam yet: Please make sure that you i) registered via HISPOS---or in the way outlined by your study regulations---and ii) submitted the declaration of consent. If you did both and you still did not received an exam slot, please check if you received an email from Iris about any missing fields in you consent form. If you did both and you did not receive an email from Iris, please write an email to Iris (ihansen@mpi-inf.mpg.de) as soon as possible. Please remember: the last possibility to submit your declaration of consent is Wednesday, July 15th, 2020, 23:59 CEST.

Dear Students,
Since we already saw some declarations of consent that we can not accept, we decided to further elaborate on how to fill the form.

First, provide details about yourself in section 1. While the "intended qualification" is, e.g., B.Sc. or M.Sc. (notably, it's also fine if you add your field of study after it, e.g., M.Sc. Computer Science), the "degree programme" is, e.g., Medieninformatik, Informatik, Cyber Security, Computer Science, etc (it is also fine if you added B.Sc. or M.Sc. before the actual name).

The "Exam information" will be added by us.
To provide us with your signature, you have 3 different options:
1) print, sign, and scan the document
2) sign it with a digital pen (e.g. using a tablet)
3) sign it using a very clear, high-quality photo of your signature.

Please make sure that your provided details are complete, correct, and correspond to the expected fields, i.e., if we ask for a signature it is not sufficient to add your name using your favorite digital font.

Dear Students,

In the following, we will provide you with additional information on how we conduct the exam, what we expect from you, and what you can expect from us.

First, please prepare the following way ahead of the exam:
1) register yourself to the exam;
2) submit your declaration of consent;
3) ensure that "Zoom" works on your Hardware;
4) ensure that your microphone works and that you are audible;
5) ensure that your camera works and that you are visible;
6) ensure that you can move your camera such that the lecturer can verify that you are the only person in the room.

At the time of your exam, please follow the steps outlined below:
1) enter the Zoom session at least ten minutes before your exam slot;
2) choose a username that is closely related to your actual name;
3) wait for the examiner to move you from the Zoom session's lobby to the actual examination room;
4) provide us with your identity by either showing us your student id or your identity card;
5) reaffirm that you provide us your consent to conduct your oral exam online;
6) affirm that your physical and psychical conditions permit you to participate in the exam;
7) prove to us that there is no second person in the room and that you do not have access to any auxiliary means by turning your camera.

Each exam starts with two questions (from different topics) randomly chosen from a pool of ~60 different questions; thus, every oral exam is unique, and the chance that you encounter similar tasks as your fellow students is small. Notably, those two questions only provide a starting point for the exam---during the exam you may have to answer questions for more than two topics. If you feel more confident when you can take notes, please feel free to enter the exam with a pencil and an empty sheet of paper---please tell us that you do so at the beginning of the exam. The entire exam, including all formalities, takes 30 minutes, which leaves around 20 minutes for the actual question and answer part. If you run late, you will effectively lose time to convince us that you receive a good grade.

At the end of the exam, please follow the steps outlined below:
1) the examiner will move you into a break-out room;
2) wait for the examiner to move you back into the exam room;
3) after you received your grading (only for the oral exam itself, i.e., without applying any possible bonus) from the examiner, please leave the Zoom session.

After your exam, we will notify the examination office about your final grade (including the possible assignment bonus).

Dear Students,

As already hinted at during the last news, you must declare your consent to participate in an online oral examination.

We uploaded a blank form in German (here) and Englisch (here). Please Note: only the German version is officially binding; therefore, submissions of the English version are not allowed and will be ignored. Please fill in the information about yourself (section 1), carefully read the 'Notes' section, and provide us with your signature. 

The submission deadline is Wednesday, July 15th, 2020, 23:59 CEST and the respective submission can be done in the same interface as your regular assignment submissions under the heading ''Oral Exam: Declaration of Consent''. If you did not provide your written consent before the deadline and you did not unregister from the exam in time, you will automatically fail the exam.

Dear Students,
We conduct the oral exams between July 22nd, 2020, and July 31st, 2020. We will enable the registration for the oral exams this week (likely today); you will be able to register for the oral exams until July 15th, 2020.

The last assignment is due Thursday, July 16th, 2020, and some students may need the points of this assignment to pass the examination requirements. Those students also must register until July 15th, 2020. The examination office will _automatically_ unregister every student that did not pass the examination requirement.

Oral exams will be conducted virtually and will take approximately 30 minutes. Each student will get a calendar invitation for the exam slot.
If you register early (i.e., in this or the next week), you might receive your slot before the registration deadline; otherwise, you will receive it shortly after the registration period. Due to the high number of oral exams, slot changes are not allowed except for the following reasons:

1) Due to your timezone, the scheduled oral exam would take place before 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m.
2)You have an exam that _overlaps_ with the scheduled exam. Notably, this rule is not affected by another exam on the same day which does not overlap with our exam.
3) You have a medical certificate.
4) There are unforeseen and _important_ circumstances that _termporarily_ do not allow you to participate in the exam.

In any of such cases, we expect you to write us an email with _detailed_ information on why we should change your examination slot until three days before your examination. The decision on whether we provide you with a new slot lies on our end.

Finally, you will have to provide us with your written consent that we are allowed to conduct the exam virtually. If you registered for the exam and we do not receive your written consent before 8 a.m. on the day of your exam, you will automatically fail the exam—we will make a blank form available during this week in a separate news post. This post will also include additional information about how to send the form to us.

Dear Students,

Since Monday is a public holiday (Whit Monday [1]) we shift Oliver's Q&A session from Monday, 10 a.m. to Wednesday (June 3, 2020), 10 a.m. As a consequence, we move the Wednesday tutorial from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. We wish all of you a happy holiday!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whit_Monday

Dear Students,

As some of you already noticed, we included a wrong sub-question in Assignment 4. We removed Question 1(e), but split question 1(c) into two separate sub-questions, i.e., the question is still worth the same points, and you have no additional workload. We replaced the old version with the new one in the CMS—please download the new one.

Dear Students,

As promised, we started recording the Q&A sessions. The recordings as well as anonymized chat backlogs are available _for download_ here:

https://inet-teaching.mpi-inf.mpg.de/protected/DataNetworks2020-QA/

You need a username and password in order to enter the server.

The username is: dn2020

The password is: V3ryS3cret!

Dear Students,

as we promised during one of the last Q&A sessions, we concluded on how to handle the overlap between Hands-on Networking and Data Networks. The rules are as follows:

1) You are _not_ allowed to use both courses as an (compulsory choice) lecture / (Wahlpflicht) Vorlesung.

2) You are allowed to use Data Networks as an (compulsory-choice) lecture / (Wahlpflicht) Vorlesung while using Hand-on Networking as either a seminar, practical course / Praktika, or as a free-choice modul. If you do so, you can get the full 15 Credit Points / ECTS Points for taking both courses.

In case you have any question, do not hesitate to write us an email to inet-teaching@lists.mpi-inf.mpg.de

Dear Students,

the submission deadline for the first assignment has passed and, unfortunately, we see Students that neither found a group partner on their own nor wrote us an email. For those that submitted alone: _Only_ for this assignment, we will handle your submission the same way as all the other submissions.

For those that still need a group partner: Please write us an email to inet-teaching@lists.mpi-inf.mpg.de so we can either find a suitable group partner for you or permit you to submit alone.

For those that did not submit because they had no group partner: We will consider your submission if you send it _today_ to us via email to inet-teaching@lists.mpi-inf.mpg.de. If we do not receive the email before midnight, we will not consider your submission. For all the submissions we receive through this process, we will cap the maximum number of points for this assignment at 5, i.e., even if you achieve between 5.5 and 10 Points we will grade your assignment with only 5 points.

Starting from Assignment 2, all submissions made by a single person (that was not explicitly allowed to do so) will be strictly capped at 5 points. Further, we will no longer allow late submissions. If any important issues prevent you from submitting for a limited amount of time, please sent us an email at least _two days before_ the deadline such that we can provide you _explicitly_ with an extension.

Dear Students,
Since Zoom had no problem handling the load of all courses that started last week, we will solely rely on it for future sessions and shut down our parallel Youtube stream. We provided the Youtube stream initially as a back-up for the Zoom session; the added complexity for using both platforms, unfortunately, reduced our audio and video quality noticeably. We apologize for the inconvenience during the last Q&A session.

Starting with today's Q&A session at 2 p.m. CEST, we only rely on Zoom. This enables us to use all of Zoom's features, including polls and raising hands; therefore, we ask you to change the way you interact with us during the session. You still join the session muted and with your video disabled. If you want to verbally ask a question, please use the raise-hand feature (you can find it at the bottom of the participant's box). Afterward, The lecturer will unmute you. Besides raising your hand, you are still able to write questions to the chat.  

Since we saw significant demand for videos of the Q&A sessions, we will start to record them. We will ensure to anonymize chats in the recordings—if you include a colon in your username, we _can not_ guarantee that your entire name will be properly anonymized due to the format in which we receive the chat-backlog from Zoom. Furthermore, we will ensure that only users associated with the Universität des Saarlandes have access to the video recordings.

By using the 'raise-hand' feature, you agree that your voice and video feed may be included in the uploaded Q&A session recording.

Dear Students,

we have added the Zoom links for the tutorial sessions. You can join whichever tutorial you like—this may change in the future if we observe problems due to the number of Zoom participants. During the tutorial sessions, please only unmute yourself to ask a question. For the remainder of the time, please stay muted and disable your video. When you join the sessions you are muted and your video is disabled.

It might happen that you are asked for a password even though the invite includes it. The password for Friday sessions is: 884820, the password for Wednesday sessions is: 158566.

Dear Students,

As stated in the "Assignments" section of the CMS webpage, we do not tolerate plagiarism in any way, shape, or form. You are allowed to use external sources to complete the assignments if you highlight them. While we will not dictate you a citation style, we encourage you to use something similar to [1].

[1] http://libraryguides.vu.edu.au/ieeereferencing/gettingstarted

Dear Students,

We released the first assignment! You can find it either by clicking on "Materials" and then "Homework Exercises" or you click on the link in the Assignment table in the middle of the CMS. You can upload your solution PDF by going to "Personal Status" and clicking on "Hand-In" for the open submission. The submission deadline is Thursday, May 14 at 10 a.m. CEST. Please remember, you have to submit in groups of two students. The names and id/Matrikel numbers of both students must be noted at the top of your submission. We will not accept scans of hand-written solution—please use Latex, Word, or other text editors (preferably Latex). The last version that a group submits will be graded (regardless of which student of the group actually did the submission). Happy solving!

Dear Students,

As stated in the 'Assignments' section of the CMS page, you will solve ten assignments throughout the semester. Assignments are submitted in groups of two students. You are not allowed to solve assignments without a partner.

The exam admission depends on getting at least 50 percent of the theoretically achievable points. When achieving more than 60 percent (75 percent) of all points a grading bonus of +0.3 (+0.7) will be applied. The exam must be passed without the grading bonus.

You can attend any tutorial session regardless of the session that your partner attends—you are also allowed to attend both sessions for the same topic. Submissions are not strictly mapped to tutors, i.e., your group's assignments may get graded by a different tutor every week.

As some of you already did, you can use the forum to find group members. Besides, you can use our course's Discord server (https://discord.gg/Y7UJUDD). The first assignment needs to be submitted before Thursday, May 14 at 10 a.m. CEST.

Dear Students,

Since remote collaboration can be challenging, we provide you with a free text and voice chat. You are now able to join the Data Networks 2020 Discord server: https://discord.gg/Y7UJUDD.

Discord allows you to stay completely anonymous or to set up an account and use it from all of your devices simultaneously. To join anonymously via the in-browser app, click on the above link and enter a temporary user name. If Discord asks you to claim your account, click outside of the box.

Before you can use the server, you have to read and accept (by reacting to the post) the server guidelines. As mentioned by the guidelines, we will monitor the Discord server on a best-effort basis, i.e., it is more a place for you to collaborate than it is another way of contacting us. Yet, we will post notifications (e.g., Q&A session starts in 15 min) and other course-related information and might answer questions from time to time.

Joining the Discord server is _not_ mandatory. We will only post information to the Discord server that is available via the news section or the course's forum—you will _not_ miss any information if you do not join the Discord server.

Dear Students,

We would like to kick-off this semester with our first Q&A session next Monday at 2 p.m. CEST. The session covers organizational matters. We highly encourage you to participate and use the chance to resolve all uncertainties related to how the course is handled.

We scheduled Q&A sessions every Monday and Thursday. The Q&A session schedule—which is located in the center of this CMS page—provides you with information on the lecturer, the topic, the recommended lecture recordings, and the link to access the session. If you want to pose questions during a Q&A, please join the Zoom session—you can access the session directly from your browser, and you are _not_ required to create an account. If you want to follow the Q&A passively, you can access the session's Livestream on Youtube; the Livestream will only include the lecturer's content, i.e., you will neither be able to see nor hear the students participating via Zoom—questions posed by a student in the Zoom session will be repeated by the lecturer.

If you participate via Zoom, we initially mute your audio and disable your video. If you have a question, please post it in the _public_ chat. Our team will _privately_ contact you and ask you to unmute your audio and enable your video (you are free to skip the latter) to ask your question; if you want one of us to read out your question, please add "do not unmute: " when posting to the public chat. After you received an answer to your question, please mute your audio and disable your video.

Dear Students,

In compliance with the measures and guidelines set forth by the Saarland University [1] and the German government [2], we will start the Data Networks course in the summer term 2020 as an online lecture; there will be, at least initially, no physical lectures or tutorials. If the situation permits, this may change at a later time. For now, we replace the in-person lecture using two orthogonal methods. We will make videos with self-contained lectures available for download via this CMS (Content Management System). This will allow you to explore the lecture's content according to your schedule, network constraints, and learning speed. In addition, we provide a weekly livestream. During the livestream, the instructor will answer questions regarding the lecture content (posed via chat) as well as provide alternative explanations for the advanced lecture topics. The instructor will assume that every student watched all videos that are available at the time of the Q&A livestream. 

All livestreams will be made available via a browser app or an app that is available for Android and/or Iphone devices as well as Windows/Linux/Apple notebooks/computers.

The class includes homework assignments that can be handed in as PDFs via this CMS. The hands-on exercises will require you to install a linux VM image to follow along. Please let us know if you have major technical complications, e.g., you have no way of accessing the videos and/or livestreams from home. 

[1] https://www.uni-saarland.de/page/coronavirus/faq-beschaeftigte.html#c247053
[2] https://www.bmbwf.gv.at/Ministerium/Informationspflicht/corona/corona_status.html

Dear Students,

The Saarland University approved multiple measures concerning the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 [1]. As part of such measures, the start of the lecture period is moved to the 4th. Mai, 2020. Notably, this change does not affect the end of the lecture period. The Saarland University also consistently updates its answers to frequently asked questions [2].

Please find further information regarding the coronavirus on the official website of the Robert Koch Institute [3].

[1] https://www.uni-saarland.de/universitaet/aktuell/artikel/nr/21674.html

[2] https://www.uni-saarland.de/page/coronavirus/faq.html

[3] https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/nCoV.html