2017-02-13 Meeting Notes

Date

Feb 13, 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

Discussion Items

Minutes

• Called to order at 3:05pm.
• The minutes from February 6, 2017 were approved.
• The committee held a general discussion on moving forward with updating the sub-discipline descriptions.
  • Lumetta asked if anything interesting came out of the performing a clustering of DMI data regarding courses taken. Makela responded that this was still a work in progress. Preliminary results suggested there some of the prescribed sub disciplines showed up in this type of analysis and that there were also a few combinations of courses that were non-prescribed. Makela will work more on this and update the committee.
  • Haran pointed out that the power area regularly promoted follow-on courses to students taking, for example, ECE 330 and ECE 333. This could be on reason why the power and systems sub discipline has a higher rate of students taking multiple courses in the sub discipline.
  • Chew brought up the need for breadth for our students, who might not yet know what they want to specialize in later in their careers. Kudeki pointed out that we have students who dive deep into a subject and others who take courses across the department. The curriculum is set up to support these different approaches and this can be addressed through the student-advisor relationship. The introduction to the sub disciplines on the departmental webpage reflects this.
  • Questions were asked about how faculty were associated with the sub disciplines. This is self-selected, but it might be unclear, especially to newer faculty, how this is separate from primary/secondary research areas. Makela will look in to the specific mechanism for this selection/identification process.
  • Specific tasks for updating the sub disciplines is to work with the areas committees and/or individual faculty listed under a sub discipline to make sure the content on the pages are up-to-date. This includes the sub discipline title, description, courses, and faculty listing. It was also suggested that the course listing could be presented in a ball chart and should trace back to core courses.
  • Dragic suggested that "optics" might be a sub discipline that is missing on the listing. There was also a discussion about creating sub-disciplines that cut across the curriculum (rather than deep through a traditional research area). The committee members (and all faculty) are free to suggest such additions. It was suggested, though, that the number of sub disciplines be limited so as not to overwhelm students.
  • The meeting was adjourned at 3:40pm.

Action Items