Tag Archives: course review

Course Review: MATH 418

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Probability

“I heard you had a lot of difficulty with the last homework. So you will be relieved to note that next homework you will have another opportunity to practice similar problems.”

Text:  A First Look at Rigorous Probability Theory, 2nd ed by J.S. Rosenthal

Prof: Dr Gordon Slade

Prof Slade is very clear and keeps things simple. He also has no problem slowing down to answer questions from students if they are not following along. He has a dry sense of humor, that keeps the class interesting, and he can even by funny when he is talking in earnest.

Difficulty

After taking measure theory, several sections of the course can feel like review. This was a good thing for me, as I found MATH 420 a tad fast. There are a handful of new techniques that you learn in the homework and class, but there are not that many new concepts if you have some background in measure theory and probability. MATH 421 material also comes up in terms of weak convergence.

Key Concepts

Probability Triples

Random Variables

Distributions

Expectation

Borel-Cantelli

Modes of Convergence

Law of Large Numbers

Central Limit Theorem

Characteristic Functions

Hard Concepts

Tail Events: Kind of funny to think about. Also, include definitions of limit supremum and limit infimum for sequences of event which can be difficult to convert to statements about limits of random variables.

Weak Convergence: There are a lot of equivalent statements, and if you pick the wrong one it can be a mission to prove that convergence occurs.

Conclusion

Good review of measure theory, and gives you a mathematical foundation to elementary probability.

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Course Review: MATH 421

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Real Analysis II

“If everyone is getting closer together, and you are going to Cleveland, then everyone’s going to Cleveland!”

Text: Real Analysis: Modern Techniques and Their Applications by Gerald B. Folland

Prof: Dr Brian Marcus

Prof Marcus is one of the kindest professors I know. He also explains each concept from multiple perspectives and breaks the concepts down to simple intuition. His notes are super useful and he has a great sense of humor.

Difficulty

The classes moves somewhat slower then 420, so we went a lot more deeper into the details of certain proofs and where they come from. This meant the classes were easier to follow (and in my view more enjoyable!). Further the homework was largely straightforward. The one challenge in this course was the material towards the latter half of the term was slightly more complex and were not assessed on homework. We also may not have covered the material generally covered in a similar course.

Key Concepts

Banach spaces

Hilbert spaces

Linear functionals

Hahn Banach Theorem

Open mapping theorem

Uniform boundedness

Riesz representation theorems

Hard Concepts

Weak Convergence: Can be hard to think about neighborhoods in this topology.

Hilbert Spaces: There are a lot of nifty tricks in Hilbert spaces that are not immediately obvious, and do not work in other spaces.

Conclusion

Really fun course and learnt a lot. Nice conclusion to my studies of analysis in some sense.

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Course Review: CPSC 303

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Numerical Approximation and Discretization

“One of the questions I got at the end of last week was ‘How do you deal with the loneliness?'”

Text: A First Course on Numerical Methods, by Uri M. Ascher and Chen Greif

Prof:  Dr. Jessica Bosch

Dr. Jessica Bosch is the literally the kindest professor I have ever met. She is super-receptive of feedback and cares (possibly too much) about her students’ trials and tribulations. She once spoke about her current research relating to mathematical models of tumour growth which was pretty interesting. Her slides (along with the helpful summary slides) are usually very clear and well structured. She also has in-class chapter group quizzes which are very useful in preparing students for the midterm and final.

Difficulty

The content in the course is in some ways very simple, it is a bunch of algorithms for solving well-known math problems. However, I think this simplicity is deceiving and the course hints at a fundamental aspect of computing – how problems get transformed as they are represented in the computer, and what properties are preserved. From this perspective, the course could be very complicated. Fortunately, we do not do very complex mathematics in the course, and largely the course is quite manageable. The midterm, given the practice material, was pretty doable. The final was a bit trickier but was combined with very liberal scaling. The assignments were not bad, though Matlab can get annoying. There was also a bonus assignment which, along with the liberal final scaling, contributed to the A- average in the course.

Key Concepts

Floating point number systems

Polynomial Interpolation

Numerical Differentiation

Numerical Integration

Numerical Solutions to ODEs

Global error (Convergence) vs local error (Consistency)

Taylor Series

Hard Concepts

Butcher Tableau: Used to represent an instance of general Runge-Kutta method. Easy to get mixed up with the meaning of the different coefficients.

Barycentric weights: Used for efficient computation of Lagrange basis. Not something that would occur to you naturally.

Order of a method: Each chapter seems to have a slightly different meaning of the order and precision of a method. Good to keep track of what it means in a particular context.

Conclusion

Interesting course. A combination of annoying Matlab along with neat mathematics and clever algorithms.

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Course Review: CPSC 317

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Internet Networking

“Most people’s code must have resembled a state machine… Only two of you [had code resembling a finite state machine]?! There’s gonna be a lot of zeros on the next assignment!”

Text: Computer Networking: Top-Down Approach 7/E by James Kurose  Keith Ross

Prof:  Dr. Alan Wagner

The professor is an engaging speaker and likes to intersperse class with somewhat philosophical activities. Though he cares about his students’ learning, he is somewhat disorganized and several lectures were very unclear and confusing, even if you had done the reading. The class is not boring, however, and Dr, Wagner has a lot of useful analogies, aphorisms and anecdotes that you can learn from even if you will not be assessed on them.

Difficulty

Unfortunately, there were several issues with clarity and many more administrative issues that prevented the course from being the dynamic course Dr. Wagner intended. This resulted in amplifying the difficulty of the conceptual material being taught which is actually quite manageable. A lot of terms were not clearly defined, the slides were not structured or written well (especially if they are to be used as a study resource), and the in-class drawings on the slides often added to the general confusion rather than alleviating it. The textbook is sporadically useful, as we often deviate from it, and other times, since we jump around, we lack the pre-requisite knowledge to understand the assigned readings. The assignments are fun, but the evaluation criteria were not clearly defined and kept getting changed in different ways by various contradictory piazza posts by instructors and TAs.

Key Concepts

Networking Layer

Link Layer

Transport Layer

Various Protocols (IP, TCP, ARP etc)

DNS Lookup

Performance metrics

Communicating Finite State Machines

AS’s

Hard Concepts

DNS assignment: Implement a DNS server. The recursive calls along with the caching can get confusing, best not to do it at the last moment.

Layers: Separating out the flows in different layers can be confusing, best to read and understand an example protocol at each layer to get an idea of how it fits together.

Conclusion

Important topic, confusing delivery, still worth taking.

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Course Review: CPSC 340

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Machine Learning and Data Mining

“I don’t care if these parameters don’t mean anything to you – they don’t mean anything to me either.”

Text: (none)

Prof:  Dr. Michael Gelbart

Very affable professor. He is keen on his lectures (and even Piazza) not to be engulfed in sub-optimal questions, though, so the lectures are very well scheduled and structured. His background is in Biophysics which is pretty cool, as he will occasionally mention an application or connection to the physics that govern amoeba. He is very concerned about not contributing negatively to students’ mental health, often sparking heated Piazza discussions. Every now and then he will also drop some absolute gems such as:

“It’s easy to see that this is a good idea, but it takes a while longer to realize that it’s not a horrible idea”

“There’s a lot more to your loss function than just your GPA”

“Most of us already find it hard to find our way in this three-dimensional world”

“The mindset you should have right now is ‘I’m awake'”

“I’m a bit afraid to try this, but… Whatever”

“I was so much happier living a happy life, predicting the mean every time”

[Credits to Philip Haupt for recording these XD]

Difficulty

This course covers a LOT of material. The assignments are also very time-consuming. The actual material varies from trivial facts about parabolas to quite complex gradient calculations involving matrices. That said, the midterms and finals do not go very deep into the material. Ultimately the average for the course was an A and I don’t think there was any scaling.

Key Concepts

Classification

Regression

Clustering

Dimensionality Reduction

Loss Functions

Regularization

Fundamental Trade-off

Neural Networks

Hard Concepts

Convolutional Neural Networks: Not really sure how they worked. Thankfully, no question was asked about it on the final exam.

Kernel Regression and Kernel Trick: Not immediately obvious how these things work and inter-related. Possibly useful to think of the underly mathematics of inner products.

Conclusion

A broad introduction to the hot-topic that is Machine Learning. Enjoyable though time-consuming class.

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Course Review: CPSC 311

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Definition of Programming Languages

“I prefer the word ‘thunk’ to expression closures.”

Text: Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi

Prof: Dr. Steve Wolfman

Wolfman was slightly less flipped in CPSC311, especially as the term progressed. His lectures were pretty entertaining and included a lot of live modification of the interpreter. Instead of sticking to textbook examples of dynamic scope and laziness, we often worked on languages in assignments and midterms where exotic adaptations and variants of these concepts were incorporated into a language in mind-bending ways.

Difficulty

I expected this to be an easy course. It ended up taking a lot of time. A lot of the programming languages concepts were completely new to me and combined with Wolfman’s avant-garde presentation of the material, I spent a great deal of time preparing for midterms and understanding the readings. The project we selected was in Elixir, and it was also very time-consuming as we had to learn distributed systems concepts in a new language with little guidance. That said, I feel the project was kind of a ‘choose-your-on-adventure’. You could do very well in the project with far less work if you chose wisely initially. Overall, the average was quite hight (around 77%) even though the midterm averages were quite low.

Key Concepts

Scoping

Deferred evaluation

Recursion

Continuations

Functional programming

SKI combinator

Interpreters

 Hard Concepts

Dynamic scope: Really messes with your brain, helps to write out the context.

Continuations: Odd concept. Helps to think of what function the continuation is bound to and apply it.

SKI combinator: Takes practice to get used to ‘algebraic’ manipulations of functions.

Conclusion

Learnt a lot. Enjoyed the project. Challenging course.

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Course Review: MATH 227

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Advanced Calculus II

“Consider an infinitesimal paddle wheel…”

Text: (none)

Prof: Dr. Joel Feldman

Dr. Joel Feldman strikes a great balance between being really organized, while still pretty relaxed. He is very helpful, in that he is always available between classes for questions. He is also really knowledgeable about the field (as he is a mathematical physicist) which is great, though he did give us a particularly tragic expression when we said we didn’t know what curl was, halfway through the course and he had to explain it.

Difficulty

The weekly assignments are generally all straightforward. The questions vary from computational to small proofs. I missed the first midterm, but a lot of people got wrecked, and it looked tough so watch out. Each question in the second midterm was manageable, though it required thinking. The challenge is that there are only four questions, so the cost of getting one question completely wrong is quite high. The final was similar except it had more questions. The challenge then was that often it was not clear which of the various techniques we had learned in the course was the correct approach to a question.

Key Concepts

Analysing/ parameterizing curves in 2,3-space

Analysing/ parameterizing surfaces in 3-space

Analysing/ parameterizing vector fields in 3-space

Integrating over curves, vector fields, and surfaces

Integral Theorems

 Hard Concepts

 

Applications of integral theorems: Hard to pick the right strategy that is going to work.

Biot-Savart Law: Really abstract, not sure if I understood it.

Conclusion

Feels like a fun physics course. Wish we had more time to discuss differential forms, but other than that pretty interesting class.

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Course Review: CPSC 221

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Basic Algorithms and Data Structures

“After 221 all of you should use “divide-and-conquer” when handing out exams, its a lot more efficient!”

Text: Objects, Abstraction, Data Structures, and Design Using C++ by Koffman, Elliot B., and Wolfgang, Paul

Prof: Dr. Alan Hu

Dr. Alan Hu is great at making everyday metaphors (often involving Justin Bieber) out of abstract computer concepts. He is also very patient in class, answering questions in detail. His classes have a slightly “free-wheeling” style because of this, so the lack of structure could distract some. Dr. Hu is a super approachable guy, (except during exams!), and he seems genuinely passionate about teaching computer science.

Difficulty

The assignments and labs are all do-able, though the penalties for small compilation errors on assignments are harsh. The midterm was pretty long and it had a mistake on it and I (and many others) got wrecked. The final was significantly easier and the scaling was huge. There is a lot of material in the course though, and the questions on exams definitely require some thinking. However, if you are okay with mathematical proofs and work consistently you should be okay after scaling.

Key Concepts

Big-O, Theta, Omega (Time and Space Complexity)

Sorting Algorithms

Basic Data Structures

Iteration and Recursion

Basic Graph Theory

Parallelism

 Hard Concepts

Proof of program correctness: Slightly different than mathematical proof, make sure to fully understand the conditions for a program to be correct. I only realized towards the end of the course, that this requires you to really read and understand the code fully.

Implementation in C++: Algorithms can look a lot less elegant in C++, so one needs to be familiar with common coding style in that language to interpret algorithms well.

Evaluating time complexity of given algorithm: Generally easy, but curve-balls can be thrown. Try breaking it down or stepping through the code.

Conclusion

Really important course for interviews, (along with 213). Felt like I improved a lot of reading code, and Dr. Hu was pretty entertaining.

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Course Review: CPSC 310

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Introduction to Software Engineering

“The only things that matter are lives and money.”

Text: (none)

Prof: Dr Elisa Baniassad, Dr Gail Murphy, Dr Marc Palyart

Elisa shares a lot of her experience, and how things work in the “real world”, which is helpful for an engineering class. She is also pretty approachable and sympathetic to any concerns that you might have. Dr Murphy created a lot of useful examples, and live-coded in class which was also a great way to learn. Dr Palyart followed a similar approach to Dr Murphy.

Difficulty

The on going “agile development” project during labs is the only thing that really matters. It is where most of your learning takes place, and you don’t get a lot of help for that, so its pretty tough. The classes look at various buzzwords, design patterns and software development processes and these are assessed in the exams. The in class material is not very hard to understand at all.

Key Concepts

Design of Web Applications

Implementation with TypeScript, JavaScript, Mongo etc

Software development processes

Testing

 Hard Concepts

 

Networking: If, you, like me, have never taken a networking course, a lot of how the internet etc is working will seem like magic.

Nodejs: Return of asynchronous programming. Common source of bugs.

Git: Took me a while to get comfortable uploading etc with git.

Self-learning: Sometimes, you just have to use google and your own ingenuity to come up with a band-aid solution to get stuff working when you understand less than you would like and don’t have time to learn more.

Conclusion

Project is great experience, working as a group and learning new skills. Really hard though! Classes are okay, not much you couldn’t read from a book.

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Course Review: CPSC 110

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Computation, Programs, and Programming 

“Trust the natural recursion!”

Text: (online videos via Coursera on Systematic Program Design)

Prof: Dr Ronald Garcia

Ron is a cool guy. Great sense of humour. He spent a lot of time answering basic questions and doing (generally) simplified examples which annoyed some, since they had already grasped the basics from the videos, and wanted him to explain the more complex aspects of the course. I didn’t mind, since I failed to fully grasp some of the basics from the videos. And sometimes Ron’s simplifications can be applied to a more complex setting. For example, the way he explained built in abstract functions was simple but did not leave out any nuances.

Difficulty

I worked very hard in this course. Some people who had serious prior programming experience, or got really addicted to programming once initiated by this course, found the assignments and tests a breeze. I did not. I got a very good result, but I think that was a result of generous scaling and a lot of hard work on my part. Problem sets are increasingly difficult. Though the first midterm is really easy if you made the faintest attempt to keep up with the material, the second midterm and the final are exponentially harder.

Key Concepts

HTDF recipe

HTDD recipe

Recursion

Abstraction

Hard Concepts

Work-list accumulators: Required me to fundamentally alter the way I saw the structure of  my template, which was a challenge. Lots of moving parts as well.

Back-tracking search over generated trees: Most finals have a question on this, pretty tough, with so many moving parts, but the structure is pretty repetitive.

Abstract fold functions: Making one is easy, but using one to solve a problem is a challenge. Requires practice, insight and being methodical.

Lab

Generally okay lab, since the TA’s are on hand to help. This was in stark contrast to the problem sets which are generally harder, and you have to work on individually. I found the first few labs super-simple, but the one’s after the first midterm increased dramatically in hardness. I generally did not come close to the the 3-hour mark, though many people often remained till the end and many others would finish ahead of me within the first 30 minutes.

 Conclusion

If you are not really  into programming, or have no serious programming experience, be prepared to work very hard to get the most out of this course. I honestly felt that the course was rushed and I didn’t have time to digest what I had learnt.

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