FAQ
Timing
The class is held on Tuesday afternoon 4-7pm in 306 Soda Hall. Tuesday is also the day for meeting up with me (418 Evans Hall). The rationale is that I need to travel from Silicon Valley to Berkeley and I cannot afford the time for driving to Berkeley more than once a week. I may be able to make exceptions for meetings outside the meeting schedule if you’re willing to come and meet me in Santa Clara.
Assignments
- There will be 5-6 sets of assignments, due every second week.
- I strongly discourage you from copying solutions of your fellow students since you’re depriving yourself of the experience of learning how to solve the problems on your own. In particular you won’t learn useful things for the exams and projects this way. Or for that matter, from the course.
- That said, feel free to discuss the solutions with others. You will likely benefit from that.
Exams
- There are no exams.
Project
- The project contributes the lion’s share to your grades. You can team up in teams of sizes 2-4, ideally 3. Anything beyond these numbers is not OK and I will take the number of team members into account in the evaluation (i.e. a great two student project is probably not going to be such an impressive four student project). All team members will receive the same score (it’s too difficult for me to assess fairly who contributed how much based on possibly contradicting statements). So choose wisely who you work with. - You will be expected to give a project presentation around midterm. - You will be expected to present a poster of the project at the end of the term. - You will be expected to provide a report describing the project in the end. It should describe your work in a reproducible manner, i.e. in enough detail that someone competent could take the report and regenerate the results (after some work but no guesswork) reliably.
Scribe
- There are a limited number of classes, fewer than the likely audience. So not everyone will be able to serve as a scribe.
- It is a fair amount of work to produce a good script. If you volunteer to scribe (I’ll accept up to two volunteers per lecture) you’re expected to produce a quality result that your fellow students will be able to use.
- Remember, whatever is posted online is forever.