Welcome to ESE 2000. This page contains important information to help you make the most of this course. Please read with care.
Quick links
Calendar
Throughout the term we will follow this calendar. Please earmark it for reference. It has links to access to the assignments and lab pages on which you are supposed to be working each week.
Recitations
We will have recitation sessions where you get the chance to interact with a teaching assistant (TA) in small classroom setting. The goal of these sessions is to discuss lab assignments (see below for lab information). The TAs are members of my research group. They are dedicated and knowledgeable. Please take advantage of this opportunity.
Recitations start on Week 2. You can sign up for one of the slots in this form.
| Day | Time | Location | TA |
| Tuesday | 9am-10am | AGH 214 | Shervin |
| Wednesday | 9am-10am | AGH 214 | Teresa |
| Wednesday | 10am-11am | AGH 216B | Ignacio |
| Thursday | 8am-9am | AGH 214 | Romina |
| Thursday | 9am-10am | AGH 214 | Romina |
| Friday | 9am-10am | AGH 214 | Antonio |
| Friday | 10am-11am | AGH 214 | Pedro |
| Friday | 11am-12pm | AGH 214 | Ignacio |
| Friday | 4:30pm-5:30pm | AGH 216A | Antonio |
Attendance to recitation sessions is required for lab report submissions. I.e., if you do not attend recitation sessions you and your group are not allowed to submit a report. We understand, however that you may need to miss a few sessions for whatever reason. We will therefore accept up to 2 missed recitations throughout the term.
Materials
During each week of the term we will give you one or two documents called lab assignments. These documents are required reading. In addition to descriptions of the tasks you are to accomplish they contain a substantial amount of background material. Some of this material will be reviewed in lectures. However, I will assume that you have read these documents before attending lectures.
In addition to the lab assignments we will release one or two Jupyter notebooks with the lab’s solution. The reason for releasing the lab solutions are (i) To help you jump straight into the more important parts of the lab (ii) To aid you in the programing of the more important parts of the lab. It is instructive to take a look at the solution of Lab 1A to understand these points. Task 1 asks to load data make some plots. There is not much to learn here other than the commands that instruct the computer to load data and make plots. I’d rather give them to you than have you spend hours searching online or asking a chatbot. Make sure you understand the commands and move on.
Task 2 asks you to implement some interesting computations. There is something important to learn here, which is how to get an equation and implement its computation. This is a part of the lab that I would expect you to attempt to do on your own. If you are failing to make progress, checking the solution may help.
In releasing the solution I am trusting that you will use it wisely. It may be tempting to just run my notebook and hand me back my own answers. However tempting this is a waste of your time. You are better off spending three hours to develop your own solution than spending one hour running mine.
Lectures
We meet for lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm in the Amy Guttman Hall Auditorium
Lab Assignments
We will have 17 lab assignments throughout the term.
You will work in groups of five. The labs are designed to be worked on your own. The purpose of having teams is to give you a sounding board. If you are stuck on a question, chances are your partners are not. If the five of you are stuck on a questions, it may be a good idea to submit a question to the discussion board for the TAs to answer.
When you complete the assignment, you will have to submit a report for the group by having one group member submitting the report to Canvas. The labs will contain very concrete instructions on how to write the reports. I am interpreting the lab reports under the language of the Paperwork Reduction Act. They are intended for you to complete in less than one hour after you finish your work. No need for florid language, showing work, or code submission. For each question we will ask for a short deliverable. The goal is simply to check that your answers are correct. If your answers are not correct, we will get back to you to offer you a chance for corrections. As long as you implement these corrections, you will get full marks for the assignment.
The labs are designed to illustrate points I will be making in lectures. I am telling you this because labs also have a heavy development component. You will have to write some code that is not difficult but not easy either. I don’t want you to loose focus on the fact that the objective of the lab is not to get the code working. Rather, the focus of the lab is to understand why your code works.
The labs will use the Python programming language, the PyTorch library for machine learning. You don’t need to be familiar with Python or Pytorch. We will go over the use of both in Labs 1A, 1B and 1C. For those of you who are not familiar with Python and Pytorch, going over Lab 1X may be helpful.
Grading
I believe that we are all better off when each of us does their best in whatever role life demands of us. The course topics are the best I could find a way to teach, the course materials are the best I could prepare, and the lectures will be the best I can deliver. I expect you to grant me the same courtesy. Attend lectures and pay attention and put your best work into the labs. In the end, learn as much as you can. For as long as you do this, I will make it my mission that you earn an A for this course.
My colleagues, however, have the reasonable expectation that I utilize a more defensible grading policy. For this reason, grading in ESE 2000 is based on class attendance, lab grades, short lecture quizzes and two midterms. Setting aside attendance for the time being, this is how grades are apportioned:
- Labs. We have 17 labs, some of which are longer than others. Short labs are worth 3 points and long labs are worth 6 points. The total of lab points awarded is 66.
- Lecture quizzes. At the end of each lecture I will give you one question that you need to answer. The answer to this question should take 5 minutes to answer and you are required to answer it online by the end of the day. You can only submit an answer if you have attended the lecture. These questions double count as attendance checks. You are not allowed to share the question with absent classmates. Each of your answers is worth 0.5 points, for a total of 11 points.
- Midterms. We will have two short midterms (check the calendar for dates.) Each midterm will have 6 short questions, each of which will earn you 2 points for a total of 12 points for each midterm.
The total possible score is 101 points. Before assigning grades, your point will be scaled by your attendance. We have 22 sessions without counting midterms and midterm reviews to which attendance is not mandatory (the review may be repetitive and I suppose you will want to attend the midterms regardless). I am also not taking attendance during the first two lectures to accommodate late registrations. This leaves a total of 20 lectures with mandatory attendance. Your final score for ESE 2000 is computed as follows:
$$ \text{final score} = (\text{lab score}) \times \text{min} \left[1, \left(\frac{\text{attendance}}{18}\right)^{1/4}\right]$$
Yes, this is an awkward equation. But its purpose is that you can have two absences without any consequences. Beyond that, each absence discounts your grade by about 2 percent for the next 5 absences. After that, your grade degrades quickly and I would recommend that you drop the course.
A score of 93 or more earns you an A and a score between 90 and 92 an A-. Scores between 80 and 89 will earn you a B-, B, or B+, scores between 70 and 79 earn you a C-, C, or C+ and scores between 60 and 69 earn you a D-, D, or D+. In all cases, the the first three numbers of the range (e.g., 80, 81, and 82) earn you a minus decoration (e.g., a B-) and the last three (e.g., 87, 88, and 89) earn you a plus decoration (e.g., a B+). If you score 101 points you earn an A+ and heartfelt hug if you don’t think it’s creepy.
Use of Electronics in Class
Electronics are not permitted in class. This means no phones, computers, tablets or any other device that is not needed to help you with a disability. Electronics should stay at home, in your backpack or your pockets. A turned off device on top of your desk table is not acceptable.
I make an exception for emergency situations that require you to be localizable in short notice. E.g., your partner is pregnant and close to her due date, you are expecting a a callback from a potential employee, or a loved one is going through a difficult time. I ask that in this case you sit in the front row so that I can now to let you be if you are checking your phone during class.
I am aware that some of you may think that this policy is absurd. I get your point. When I graduated college in 1998 I got a job working for a cellphone operator which provided me with a free phone at a time when they were still expensive to use. You can therefore say that I am pioneer of phone addiction and I got angry at my newlywed wife when she pointed that I should use my phone less. There is, however, quite a lot of evidence that learning outcomes improve in electronic-free classrooms. Also, think of this as a good story to tell your grandkids: “When I was in college, I had this professor, you wouldn’t believe it…, mind you, the guy was brilliant, very charismatic and handsome to boot.”
Etiquette
Etiquette is the code of polite behavior in a certain environment. Here are some etiquette rules that apply to a learning environment:
- Reading assignments, class attendance and, lab work. You are expected to read all reading assignments, attend all lectures, and develop solutions to all labs.
- Class behavior. Pay attention during lectures. Do not talk with your classmates and do not get distracted online.
- Code of Ethics. Every piece of work that you hand back to me and my teaching assistants must be your own.
My experience is that these rules are unnecessary for the vast majority of you. You are a lovable bunch of hard working kids and you were already planning on following these rules. After all, the etiquette rules above are common human decency. We owe respect to each other’s work. It is disrespectful to register for a course and then skip reading assignments, talk with your friends during lectures, or use a text generator to answer lab questions. It is also disrespectful for a teacher to sign up to teach a class and then make it boring and incomprehensible. My promise is that I will teach the best course that I can. If something is unclear or boring, it is because making it more fun and clearer is beyond my abilities. I expect your promise to be that you will learn as much as you can.
I should also state my belief that teaching is a privilege. I am thankful to my fellow citizens for granting me the privilege to teach and I am thankful to my students for taking their time to learn from me. As we start to work together, please accept my gratitude.
Violations of the Code of Ethics
I expect you to behave ethically because, as I explain above, it is the polite thing to do. Unfortunately, society also expects me to police unethical behavior. I do not like this role. On the other hand, we gotta do what we gotta do.
Every piece of work that you hand back to me or my teaching assistants must be your own. I have a no tolerance policy for violations of this norm. If I judge that you submitted work that is not your own, I will refer the case to the office of student conduct. If it turns out that my assessment is correct, you will get a fail grade.