Minutes 9/13/2021

Date

Apr 26, 2016

Attendees

A. Aggarwal, J. Allen, A. Banerjee, U.K. Bhowmik, S. Bogdanov, Z. Cheng, P.D. Dragic, K. Driggs-Campbell, M. Hasegawa-Johnson, R. Iyer, N. Kani, J. Kim, S. Mitra, T. Moon, U. Ravaioli, J. Schuh, P. Song.

Minutes

The majority of the meeting was spent discussing the following request for additions of courses to the list of technical electives.

IBE 362 “Marine Biology” – This course request came in at the very end of Spring 2021 and there was no conclusive feedback leading to a formal vote.  The topics discussed in the course cover topics on environment which have social implications and are important for engineers to appreciate.  At the same time, there are concerns about the rigor of this course and whether it is sufficiently advanced to be on the list of ECE technical electives.  It was decided to prepare an online poll to give time to all the new members to read the material collected on the class and then vote on the approval.

BIOE 485 “Computational Mathematics for Machine Learning and Imaging” – Positive comments on this courses were expressed by many attendees.  Given the focus on bioengineering and imaging, this offering provides welcome additional opportunities for students.  No objections were recorded and the course was approved for ECE technical elective.

STAT 425 “Statistical Modeling I” – Also this course received many favorable comments.  It provides students deeper exposure to regression models in statistics which are quite useful for data analysis.  No objections were recorded and the course was approved for ECE technical elective.

CS 437 “Topics in Internet of Things” – The committee discussed the content of courses and comments by Prof. Deming Chen (instructor of a recently developed ECE course on Internet of Things), which were collected by the chair prior to the meeting.  In general there were concerns about the rigor of the course and the amount of overlap with the ECE 498 course taught by Prof. Chen, which will be offered in Spring 2022 with permanent number ECE 479.   As a group, the committee would like to understand better how the ECE and CS course should coexist and whether it is really appropriate to include it in the official list of ECE technical electives at this time.  Other issues to consider are whether the CS 437 course would be more appropriate for EE majors and, given the overlap, whether there should be credits restrictions for students taking both courses.  In the end it was decided that it should be better to table the request and perhaps consider it again if there is demand after ECE 479 is taught again under the permanent number.  In the meantime, there is no objection to consider occasional requests for technical elective credits at the discretion of the ECE undergraduate advising office, through the mechanism of a curriculum modification to be processed by the college of engineering.   

In the last few minutes of the meeting there was a brief introduction of the other topics (Instructional Remote Kits, Strategic Plan for UIUC Robotics Education) and discussion is planned for the next meeting on September 20, 2021.