December 10, 2013, Minutes of the Curriculum Committee Meeting

ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for December 10, 2013

Members AY 2013-14:  Tangul Basar, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Deming Chen, John Dallesasse, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, Bruce Hajek (Chair), Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Rakesh Kumar, Stephen Levinson, Daniel Liberzon, Yi Lu, Steven Lumetta, Jonathan Makela, Sayan Mitra, Michael Oelze, Maxim Raginsky, Elyse Rosenbaum, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Paris Smaragdis, Venu Veeravalli, Daniel Wasserman

Attendees: Chen, Dallesasse, Dominguez-Garcia, Hajek, Kudeki, Levinson, Mast, Sanders, Schmitz, Smaragdis, Veeravalli (and undergraduate students Tej Chajed, Andrew Kluemke, and Dennis Yuan)

1. The minutes of the meeting of December 3 were approved.

2. The committee accepted the report of the ad hoc committee for ECE 110.  Course director Chris Schmitz will submit the proposal for a revised ECE 110 by January.

3.  Information item (prompted by the fact that the revised ECE 110 will include some coverage of matlab).  Two or three years ago the CC approved a requirement for all EE students to have some proficiency in scientific computing by the end of their sophomore year.   The requirement could be satisfied by taking a course such as CS 101, the honors section of ECE 210, or individual study outside course structure.  This requirement has  not yet been advertised to students, so we will begin this process.  For example, Erhan is thinking of adding a link to the curriculum page, and also informing students of the requirement while they are in ECE 110.

4. The committee examined the assignment of teaching laboratories to rooms, presented by Dan Mast.  No action items resulted.

5. The committee approved the request that ECE 398BD be classified as a laboratory course for the purpose of the EE technical elective laboratory requirement.

6. The list of technical elective laboratory courses was examined, including some courses not on the list that could be candidates for the list.    There is an increasing number of courses with extensive software problems/projects that could be considered to be software laboratories.     There seems to be some inconsistency  in what is considered a lab course and what is not.    A resolution might be to increase the number of required laboratory courses from two to three, increase the number of courses that would qualify, and require that at least one of the three courses be a hardware laboratory course.   A change in this direction could be submitted along with the minor revision of the EE curriculum already in preparation for January submittal.   Further discussion is needed.

7. A preliminary look at the proposal and syllabus for the new ECE 401 Signal and Image Analysis (and the related 498MH for Fall 2014) was taken.  The understanding of the CC from discussions last year (communicated by Steve Levinson) is that the course is not intended for EE technical elective credit.   Instead, it is to serve non majors.

8.  The meeting was adjourned at 1:50 p.m.

These minutes drafted by B. Hajek, December 10, 2013.