Date
Jan 23, 2017
Attendees
AY 2016-2017 Members: Michael Bailey, Can Bayram, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Subhonmesh Bose, Weng Chew, John Dallesasse, Peter Dragic, James Eden, Liang Gao, Bruce Hajek, Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Kiruba Haran, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Yih-Chun Hu, Seth Hutchinson, Raluca Ilie, Ravishankar Iyer, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Minjoo Lee, Stephen Levinson, Steven Lumetta, Jonathan Makela (Chair), Sanjay Patel, Maxim Raginsky, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Christopher Schmitz, Jose Schutt-Aine, David Varodayan, Lara Waldrop, Jin Zhao, Zhizhen Zhao, Hao Zhu, Wenjuan Zhu
Guest: Venu Veeravalli
Discussion Items
| Time | Item | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 5min | Approve minutes from Dec 08, 2016 | Makela |
| 20min | Discuss/vote on:
| All |
| 10min | Update on "sub disciplines" discussions | Makela/All |
Minutes
- Called to order at 3:03pm.
- Minutes from Dec 08, 2016 were approved.
- The committee discussed the proposed permanent version of ECE 398BD, proposed as ECE 450: Data Science and Engineering. The course proposer, Venu Veeravalli joined the committee for the discussion.
- ECE 398BD is currently being offered for the fourth time this semester. The enrollment has been robust in each offering.
- The content of the course, specifically the application modules are different each offering. This provides flexibility for the different course instructors to offer examples relevant to their own work and will ensure that the topics are at the forefront of the field. In the original offering of ECE398BD, five such modules were offered, but this has been reduced to one module on "Foundations of Machine Learning" (which are common amongst offerings) and two application areas (i.e., Audio and Video Analytics, Biological Data Analytics). Veeravali noted that the provided syllabus was incorrect in the topics covered during the "Foundations" section and pointed to the course website for the correct topic list [updated syllabus].
- The committee discussed how rotating topics in a course would be communicated to students considering enrolling in the course. This would most likely be done through advertisements on the building flat panel displays and through individual undergraduate mentoring (requiring communication of the topics to the faculty).
- The title of the course has been changed from "Making Sense of Big Data" to "Data Science and Engineering".
- Significant discussion followed regarding the appropriate level (300 vs. 400) for the course and whether graduate students would be able to enroll in the course. The 398BD course was positioned in the curriculum so juniors could take the course (ECE 313 was the prerequisite). Since the content of the course has not changed, there was concern about moving the course to the 400 level and allowing graduate credit (ultimately a decision to be made by the graduate committee). Hutchinson pointed out that time to teach more advanced topics, appropriate for a 400-level course, would be gained if topics covered in other courses (i.e., ECE 310) were removed and left to a prerequisite.
- The committee requested that the instructors involved in the course think further on whether this course should be at the 300 or 400 level. No action was taken on the proposed course.
- Makela summarized the status of the sub discipline discussion. A data request was made to DMI to perform a study of whether students appear to be using the information in the sub discipline page to choose courses. The results of that request are still pending.
- The meeting was adjourned at 3:47pm.