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The committee discussed the course CEE 412 “High Speed Rail Engineering” for possible inclusion in the list of non-ECE technical electives. The list already includes CEE 408 "Railroad Transportation Engrg" and CEE 410 410 "Railway Signaling & Control". The course was considered interesting, but from the available syllabus material it was not clear whether this offering is more of a qualitative survey or it contains sufficient quantitive quantitative material that makes it suitable as a technical elective. The chair will contact the instructors seeking information and assessment material for the committee to reconsider the reuqest request at a later meeting.
A discussion followed regarding CS 498 "Mobile Robotics" which is a new temporary Computer Science course, also for possible inclusion in the list of non-ECE technical electives. This course was considered because of a student request, but normally it is policy of the ECE Department to wait until a non-ECE temporary course has been approved at the campus level as a permanent offering. Only ECE temporary courses (ECE 398 and ECE 498) are accepted to fulfil technical elective requirements. The committee decided that at this time the course would only be valid as a free elective and that it may be considered again in the future if approved as permanent.
The committee spent the last few minutes of the meeting to introduce the items in the charge letter received from Bruce Hajek, the ECE Department Head. Erhan Kudeki noted that the last item, inquiring about the status of the course "Programming Methods for Machine Learning", no longer requires discussion since it has already been submitted for campus approval. The other items deals deal with the organization of the ECE curricula in terms of sub-disciplines, whether such sub-disciplines still represents well our evolving curricula. Also. , the charge asks whether a major update necessary for the web pages of existing sub-disciplines and new courses need to be proposed to serve better the needs of existing and emerging areas. The committe plans to spend the next meeting for an initial in-depth discussion of the items in the charge letter.