Tentative grades are due 4/17. Estimates will in large part be based on your progress by 4/16. If you think that is not representative, please contact the instructor in person or by mail to fox@vt.edu
Dr. Lee will join our class for a discussion. Please come! There will be a survey and your comments will help the CS department improve the educational experience of many students!
In the next decade there will be a radical shift in undergraduate education. As the average age of students goes up, and more students come to college with families and work experience, the student body will change. At the same time, we find: states less willing to spend money on higher education, parents unable to spend more on tuition, students wanting higher education in greater numbers, and employers preferring to hire those with maturity and committment to life-long learning.
Universities must become more efficient and effective. Students must change to meet the needs of employers and graduate schools in terms of achieving greater maturity, assuming more responsibility for their own learning, and working more in groups. Technology will be applied so that fewer faculty can accomplish more and so that students can learn better.
The CS department, with assistance from the National Science Foundation and the University, has played a lead role on campus in applying new technology and innovative approaches to learning. We have worked with the WWW, a variety of special software tools, personal computers, servers, labs, real-life projects, etc. Different courses have different objectives and employ different approaches, e.g., lab activities, group projects, online discussions, self-study courseware, hypertext/multimedia resources for discovery-based learning.
Compression often involves changing representation, or changing one problem to another problem. If a representation makes it simpler to identify patterns, or separate data from noise, or a hard problem suddenly gets easier to solve, we do better.
A number of fixes have been made to the PI unit due to files being moved and servers not available. If you worked on this unit before and had trouble, you might want to take a look again.
Groups will give presentations in their lab sessions on 4/25 and 4/30. They can use and project from the Instructor system, but need to pre-load any software and data required for demos. Be sure to rehearse since the presentation will count as part of the project grade. Each presentation will be limited to 10 minutes, with a few minutes after for questions and for setup for the next group. Please explain the purpose of your project, your goals, what you accomplished, and demonstrate whatever you believe will be of most interest. You are encouraged to include your presentation content as part of your project report, so it can help others later too.
The instructor can be met with for comments before the presentation in lab, and will be happy to advise and assist.
We now have enough MO cartridges to sign out several to each group using the Radius system. Each holds 300M per side (i.e., you can turn it over to get access to the rest of the 600M of files). Please talk to the instructor, GTA or Mr. Heagy. This should help you keep copies of video and other resources. The MO cartridges must be returned before the final.
Some students have had trouble with the Radius system. We know that the Hi-8 drive has intermittent problems and have another unit or may be able to help you to get it to work. For those with problems that might relate to hardware, we encourage you to reboot the system if you start work after others have been using it.