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Attending

Jont Allen, Ujjal Bhowmik, Subhonmesh Bose, Eric Chitambar, Katie Driggs-Campbell, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Erhan Kudeki, Steve Lumetta, Umberto Ravaioli, Chris Schmitz, Jose Schutt-Aine

New Business

  1. Should ECE 498ICC IoT and Cognitive Computing be an EE Lab Course? 498ICC proposal IoT Cognitive Computing Spring 2020.doc. 
    Status: APPROVED.

    Comments from the proposer:
    1. the proposal specifies three hours of contact time per week – can you verify that there is a TA available in a lab somewhere for at least three hours/week to help students, and/or direct and evaluate their work?   
      *Yes. There will be TAs supervising and helping the students, and evaluating their lab results through student demos. During Spring 2019, we actually have four different lab sessions and each session is equipped with either one 50% TA or two 25% TAs. The details can be found here: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece498icc/sp2019/

    2. are students working with hardware that they wouldn’t otherwise work with?  
      *They are working with Raspberry Pi 3, GPUs, and FPGAs in this course. They may or may not have accesses to these hardware previously but even they had accesses to these types of hardware, they were not for the goal of studying AI computation and IoT.

    3. how much work is involved in each of the labs?  Is each student really spending at least 3 hours/week for at least 4 weeks on each lab?  
      *The lab work is significant. You can refer to the labs described in the link above. Based on the experience from Spring 2019, students worked for at least 5-6 hours each week for the labs (there were four of these labs all together in Spring 19). For this second offer in 2020, we will reduce the labs to three and give more time for students to complete each lab.

    4. how many students can join each team?  
      *2 students.

    5. How are the labs evaluated?  Are the systems that students design evaluated directly, in a demo, in the lab, and if so, how?  Is there a written report that’s evaluated?  An oral report?  Is there a proposal process for lab 3 that gets evaluated in some way, and if so, how?
      *I attached the evaluation criteria for lab 4 from Spring 2019 below (you can get these and evaluation criteria for other labs by clicking into the lab links):

      Demo and Report Requirements

      Project Proposal (by April 6, 11:59 PM) (2 pts)

      You need to submit a proposal (1 to 2 pages) in the first week of this lab. Here are the basic requirements for the proposal:

      • State clearly which track you choose and which platform you will use. (0.5 pt)
      • Briefly describe the system you are proposing, and how you will implement the system. Describe the differences between your system and the existing ones. (0.5 pt)
      • List the key features you propose and the difficulties of your project. (0.5 pt)
      • List the deliverables for the middle checkpoint demo and the final demo. (0.5 pt)

      TAs will check whether the workload of your proposed project is suitable and will give you feedback.

      Middle Checkpoint Demo (week of April 15) (3 pts)

      During this demo, you need to show your TAs the progress you have made and TAs will check whether you are making good progresses as planned in your proposal.

      • Report your progress to your TA. Explain clearly what has been done and how did you achieve that. (1 pt)
      • Demo the middle checkpoint deliverables as planned in your proposal. (1 pt)
      • Show the remaining TODOs to your TA and explain what's your plan to complete those TODOs. (1 pt)

      Final Demo (week of April 29) (10 pts)

      In this final demo, you need to show a working system as proposed in your proposal.

      • Show your design in detail, emphasize the novelty and contribution to the field of your project.
      • Run your whole system end-to-end, and demo that it can achieve the functionality as described in your proposal.
      • Evaluate your design quantitatively, and compare your design with the existing designs.

      TAs may ask you questions related to the lab during your demo, please be prepared to answer TAs' questions.

      Grading rubric:

      • Completeness: Does your design achieve the goal in your proposal and have a working demo? (4 pts)
      • Quality: How good is your design's quality? The quality includes many different aspects, e.g. robustness, reusability, maintainability, etc. (2 pts)
      • Difficulty: How difficult is it to implement your design? This evaluates the workload of your project. (2 pts)
      • Novelty: How novel is your design? How different is your design from the existing ones? Are there any special features in your design? (2 pts)

      Final Report (by May 2, 11:59 PM) (5 pts)

      You need to submit a report that covers the details of your design.

      • State clearly which track you choose and which platform you will use.
      • State clearly the problem you are solving and the challenges of solving the problem.
      • Show your design in detail, emphasize the novelty and contribution to the field of your project. (2 pts)
      • Evaluate your design quantitatively, and demonstrate how your design is better than the existing ones. (2 pts)
      • Add references to your report if you referred to any resources when you work on your lab.

      (The 1st, 2nd, 5th bullet points worth 1 pt in total)

      0.5 pt is the smallest grading step for all the scores above.



2. Definition of "ECE Electrical Engineering Lab Course":

Proposed: that there should be a definition of "EE lab course" that instructors can use as a reference to decide whether or not their course is a lab course.  Committee considered these components that might be part of defining a lab course:

  1. There should be a regularly scheduled lab time with supervised activities; time spent in the lab should total 3 hours per week throughout the semester.
  2. The department should make it a priority to assign TAs to lab courses (comment: the department typically assigns TAs to non-lab courses with 25+ students, but lab courses can have smaller numbers).
  3.  It There needs to be a formal evaluation process, in lab, of the exercises students do in lab, and this evaluation needs to count toward the course grade in proportion to the number of "lab hours." 
  4. A lab course is measurement-oriented and/or design-oriented.  It depends largely on what is the desired outcome of the lab...i.e. teach concepts, observe something talked about in class, characterization, design a widget, learn how to use an instrument, and so on.
  5. there should be test and measurement equipment
    6. if the class involves design, there must be some evaluation of how well the student design works


The department assigns TAs to lab courses (the department typically assigns TAs to non-lab courses with 25+ students, but lab courses can have smaller numbers, depending on availability of resources).  It is up to the instructor to ask the department for a TA – CC is in charge of telling instructors that they have the right to do this.

What is a "Hardware Lab"?

  1. It needs to involve some sort of hardware (or hardware configuration) that students would not otherwise have the chance to use.  It involves hardware specialized to a particular type of measurement, and/or the design of hardware.

What is a "Software Lab"?

  1. A lab course that only depends on software and simulation, without specialized hardware (i.e., only using hardware that students would easily have access to on their own time, but they are required to come to lab instead, for instructional/pedagogical reasons).  Measurement is conducted entirely using software running on general-purpose hardware, and/or students are designing software for general-purpose hardware.