2017-01-30 Meeting Notes

Date

Jan 30, 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

Guests: Venu Veeravalli, Jont Allen

Discussion Items

Minutes

• Called to order at 3:06pm.
• Minutes from Jan 23, 2017 were approved.
• The committee continued discussion on the permanent version of ECE 398BD, now proposed as ECE 365: Data Science and Engineering. The course proposer, Venu Veeravalli, joined the committee for the discussion.
  • After discussions with other faculty involved in the course, the decision was to keep the course at the 300 level, rather than modify the course content and bring it to the 400 level. Kudeki pointed out that this precluded graduate students, especially MEng students, from taking this course. This led to a discussion on other courses in data science and machine learning offered in the department and college. An additional course appropriate for graduate students should be considered for development in the future. The current course, however, is aimed at undergraduate students and, as such, is appropriate at the 300 level. The committee suggested that, in the future, the content of the course could be enhanced to revise to the 400 level if deemed appropriate and necessary.
  • Some topics, such as data cleaning, are explored in the context of the application areas. Maintaining this coverage as applications change is left to the discretion of the course director.
  • Chew asked about conflicts with other courses in the college. CS offers machine learning at a higher level (i.e., CS446, CS546) and ECE has an advanced statistical learning and machine learning courses (i.e., ECE 543, ECE 544NA). However, this course is aimed at a lower level and is more applied in nature than these other courses.
• The committee approved ECE 365. In addition, it was approved an ECE elective lab course.
• The committee discussed the proposed course, ECE 298JA: Concepts in Engineering Math. The course proposer, Jont Allen, joined the committee for discussion. Note that during the discussion it was realized that the ECE 298 course had already been offered twice and, being the third time proposed, a permanent course request was also required.
  • Questions were raised as to who the intended audience was. There is a perceived need for a course to better-prepare students who have AP'd out of MATH 221 and MATH 231 for MATH 241. This course is aimed at these students as well as transfer students who do not yet have prerequisites for some of the ECE courses.
  • In moving towards a permanent course, it was suggested that MATH needs to be involved in such a course, as they provide the math service courses to the college. If there is a disconnect between what ECE needs and what MATH provides, there is reason to discuss this with them.
  • A question was asked about the unique technical content of this course, or whether this was pulling together topics available in several courses into a single course. Allen stated that the topics followed historical progressions, which helps students internalize the materials.
• No action was taken on the proposed course. Further discussion is warranted.
• The meeting was adjourned at 4:00pm.

Action Items