1. Scoring Change for Milestone 4 The bonus will be based on improvement from L3.0 to L3.1 to L4. As announced, you get a bonus for – Any improvement from L3.0  L3.1 – A 10% relative improvement from L3.1  L4 OR (new case, to avoid penalizing folks that did an awesome job on L3.1) – A 10% relative improvement from L3.0  L3.1 – Any improvement from L3.1  L4 The bonus will be computed as part of the milestone4bsubmission using only the first 12 datasets.

2. AWS Credits - brief summary Amazon Web Services – Simplest service: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Select an image (AMI ~= virtual machine), or create a custom one: like a selecting rental car type Borrow as many instances ( ~= machines) as you need and pay by the hour until you terminate the instance – Eg m3.2xlarge: 30GB Ram, 160Gb disk, 8-cpu, 64-bit » costs $0.90/hr – Eg m1.small: 1.7Gb RAM, no local disk, 1 cpu, 32/64 bit » costs $0.06/hr – Also supports map-reduce, etc, etc. – What’s the catch?

3. AWS Credits - brief summary We have an Amazon grant for this course – don’t be constrained by your laptop Allocated: $100/student – Ask us and we will give it to you a code Email your request to: 10601awscode@gmail.com10601awscode@gmail.com What is it? Redemption site: http://aws.amazon.com/awscredits Promotion Name - EDU_Course_Cohen_CarnegieMellon_Summer2013 Each Promotion code amount is - 100.0USD Promotion Start Date -2013-08-02 00:00:00.0 Promotion End Date -2014-08-31 00:00:00.0 Redemption site: http://aws.amazon.com/awscredits Promotion Name - EDU_Course_Cohen_CarnegieMellon_Summer2013 Each Promotion code amount is - 100.0USD Promotion Start Date -2013-08-02 00:00:00.0 Promotion End Date -2014-08-31 00:00:00.0

4. AWS Credits - the catch(es) You need to set up an individual AWS account and back it up with your credit card – AWS says: “We HIGHLY recommend you remind students to turn off any instances after each class/session – as this can quickly diminish the credits and start charging the card on file. The account holder is responsible for the overages.” – I can not erase overages by giving you another code. (Sometimes begging Amazon works, but that’s not guaranteed.) You can monitor activity (Access management, IAM) and set up “CloudWatch alarms”) to shut down instances. – I’ll send an email to the class with details