Report on Undergraduate Forum of March 22, 2017

The CSE Undergraduate Studies Committee (UGSC) organized the annual undergraduate forum on March 22, 2017 in BE 180. The forum started at about 5:30 pm and continued till about 6:45 pm, with most students staying on till near the end. The summary below tries to describe the main points that were made during the discussions. The summary is based on notes made by Paolo Bucci and Jeremy Morris; many thanks to both for taking detailed notes.

Students:

Glen Gainer.25

Brian Gainer.34

Ernest Parke.26

Shyam Thiagarajan.12

Anshu Kumar.472

Jeremy Kaufman.405

Yihang Du.376

Stephen Wu.2719

Courtney Campbell.1807

Edrienne Co.11

Emily Engle.165

Winnie Li.3899

Jiway Kim.6323

Faculty: Matthew Boggus, Paolo Bucci, Doreen Close, Mike Fritz, Michael Green, Wayne Heym, Jeremy Morris, Neelam Soundarajan, Paolo Sivilotti, Rafe Wenger, Annatala Wolf

Advising staff: Leslie Dowler, Nikki Strader, CA Wade

Systems staff: Dave Kneisley

1. Neelam briefly welcomed everyone to the forum, explained the purpose of the forum, and explained the activities of the Undergrad Studies Committee and the Curriculum Committee. Following that, everyone in the room introduced themselves.

2. Rafe Wenger (who is Associate Chair for the dept. and is responsible for determining how many sections of each course to offer in each semesters and for assigning them to suitable faculty) talked about waitlists for the courses, etc. All majors who schedule their CSE courses when their registration windows open have been able to get into the courses. The few exceptions are with respect to courses that are intended to serve both CSE graduate students as well as undergraduate students such as CSE 5523, Machine Learning. Rafe noted that we are trying to recruit faculty who can teach additional sections of these high-demand courses. Students at the forum did not report any case of being closed out of a course if they scheduled when their registration window opened.

   One point worth noting is that students following a particular specialization option do not have any special priority for courses related to or recommended for that option. It was also noted that CSE 5914, the capstone course based on the Watson system, while it is recommended for students pursuing the AI specialization option, does not "count" as part of the option. This is to ensure that students following this option actually take at least three courses that discuss key AI concepts (whereas 5914 is primarily focused on using the Watson system to build interesting application(s)). (Similarly 5911 doesn't "count" for the Software Engineering option.)

3. Specific courses of interest:
   • Paul Sivilotti talked about CSE 3903, one of the junior project courses that has been on the books but not offered for quite a while. Paul will be offering a section of this course in the fall (M,W,F at 10:20). This course, like 3901 and 3902, is very much a project-oriented course, the difference being that the context of the projects in this course will be at a systems level. Thus, students will implement an assembler, linker, simulator, for a simple assembly language. It will be somewhat similar to CSE 560, the 5-credit hour course that we used to offer under the quarter system. Indeed, as Neelam mentioned, several members of the department's Advisory Board had, at the board's meeting last year, were surprised and somewhat disappointed at our failure to offer such a course on a regular basis (after the switch to the semester system in 2012). These members had, when they were students in the dept., taken CSE 560 and recalled how much they had benefited from the course. CSE 3903 should address these concerns. The projects in 3903, like the projects in 3901 and 3902, will involve a lot of design; but the 3903 projects will include a lot more code development. Students were urged to consider taking the course and recommend the course to other students as well.
   • 5xy9: The dept. offers a number of 2-cr hr. courses. Most of these are likely to be of little interest to undergrad students since most are intended to familiarize graduate students interested in research in a specific area to recent developments and open problems in the area. Nevertheless, some of these courses may be at a level that undergrad students may also benefit from them; so students should keep an eye out for announcements concerning these courses.
   • 4194: A new 3-credit course on cloud computing is being developed. The course is being piloted this semester (CSE 4194) and should be offered each spring. This course would be a suitable alternative to CSE 5242 (Database II), especially since the latter course is designed, in part, to serve the needs of PhD students interested in research in the area and some undergrad students have found it rather overwhelming.
   • CSE 2501, Phil 1338: CSE 2501 is a 1-cr hr course dealing with ethical and professional issues related to computing; it is also designed to help students develop their oral and written communication skills. Mike Green, the coordinator for the course briefly described the course. Philosophy 1338 is a newly developed 4-credit course that was offered for the first time in Au '16 and is expected to be offered every semester. This course is a combination of (the 3-cr hr) Phil 1337 and CSE 2501. Its topic is an introduction to ethical theory with a focus on ethical issues related to computing. The problem with 1337 was that students who had taken it before 2501 found much of the discussion in 2501 to be repetitive. Thus the idea of 1338 was to include the material from 1337 and, like CSE 2501, includes student presentations and feedback to improve students' communication skills. Students who take Phil 1338 will be able to count 3 credit hours of the course toward the GE requirement and the fourth hour toward 2501 which they will not have to take. The instructors from the Philosophy Dept. are working closely with us to ensure that the course suits the needs of CSE and CIS majors.

4. Why CSE 2501/Phil 1338 is required: Some students felt that CSE 2501 was not really useful and questioned the need for it in the curriculum. Neelam noted that the (ABET) accreditation criteria for the BS-CSE program require that students in the program acquire an understanding of professional, ethical, legal, security and social issues and responsibilities. The criteria also require students to acquire an an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences. CSE 2501 and Phil 1338 are designed to help meet these requirements. And even apart from the accreditation requirements, these are important outcomes that students should achieve as they go through our program so that they are well prepared for their professional careers. As a related point, one of the program educational objectives (PEOs) of the BS-CSE program has, for a long time, required, in part, that graduates of the program will be "... responsible engineering and computing professionals". During the last meeting of the department's Advisory Board (which consists of our alumni and distinguished people from a number of corporations) suggested that we might want to add, to that objective, a reference to the ACM/IEEE Code of Conduct which is part of the discussion in both CSE 2501 and Phil 1338. The capstone courses help students further refine their communication skills; and also, depending on the particular project, give an opportunity to students to explore the ramifications of ethical and professional issues in the context of the project. There was also a brief discussion of the accreditation criteria.

   Winnie Li pointed out that some of the other ABET outcomes require students to be able to function in diverse teams and, more broadly, to be familiar with diversity-related issues. CSE 2501/Phil 1338 contribute in important ways toward these outcomes. Winnie mentioned that a number of students (all members of ACM-W) have been working with the advisors to introduce some discussion of these issues Eng 1100, the survey course that all (engineering) freshmen take. Wade argued that the discussion of diversity and related issues should, preferably, continue through the curriculum so that the ideas are reinforced. Toward this end, Winnie promised to put together a collection of resources on the topic that would be avilable to faculty in more advanced courses to ensure that students in those courses to present to students, as the opportunity arises. This should help improve the extent to which (both CSE and CIS) students achieve these outcomes that are important for success in an increasingly diverse society. Thus although CSE 2501 and Phil 1338, as well as the planned discussion in the survey course etc., do not have the technical content that most CSE courses do, they play an essential role in preparing students for their professional careers.

5. Possible new courses: Given the wide range of new tools, technologies, and practices that have been introduced in the last few years, many of which are in wide use in industry, Neelam raised the question of whether any of our courses should include discussion of any of them and, if so, which course(s). A key problem, of course, is that it is hard to predict which of these items have staying power and which are likely to disappear after a short while; moreover, the wide range of available items means that no single or handful of courses would be appropriate. An alternative that we have considered is the 5xy9 model; i.e., a 2-credit course whose contents will likely change (with the tools/technologies) from one offering to the next and that deals with a number of these items, possibly related to very different topics. Most students liked the idea of a 2 cr. hr course on new technologies and tools and suggested a number of topics that would be appropriate (e.g.: Node+React; VR/AR; Maven, Gradle, ..; Deep learning, Tensor flow; etc.)
   But there are a number of questions to address before such a course can be implemented, the most important one being, who would teach the course? Most of our regular faculty would probably not be able to talk effectively about more than a handful of these tools and techniques. One possibility here would be to have an industry professional or several industry professionals teach the course; for example, perhaps three people with interests in and knowledge of a range of these specific tools/techniques could team-teach the course with each person teaching for 4-5 weeks of the semester. This will enable the students in the course to get exposed a fairly wide range of current tools and techniques. We will explore these possibilities.
   One of the advisors noted that since most of our tech elective courses are 3 credit hours each and since students are required to take 17 hours of tech electives, a 2 cr hr. course would fit well with that.

6. Bulletin board for announcements: One of the ideas that was proposed at last year's forum was the creation of a bulletin-board like facility that would list, in reverse chronological order, announcements that may be of general interest to our majors. Currently, these are sent out by email to the student mailing list but often, apparently, get overlooked in the deluge of emails that students receive. Having a specified place that archives the announcements in an easily accessible fashion would help address this issue and, indeed, was why it was proposed last year. Unfortunately, because of pressure of various other activities, this has not been implemented. We will work on getting this done in the near future.

If you have any comments or questions on this report, please email Neelam (soundarajan.1).