Archive for April, 2011
Spring 2011 Semester in review
by Phil on Apr.27, 2011, under SFU
It’s finally here: My last semester! Due to reasons I don’t want to get into, I took on a somewhat ridiculous workload the last few semesters, and specially this semester. Here we go:
CMPT 310
Artificial Intelligence
This was actually a very interesting course. It is not often taught by a sessional, but it was this time. A PhD candidate named Hassan Khosravi was teaching it, and he was by far the best sessional I’ve ever had, and better than many profs as well.
The assignments were not particularly difficult for a 3rd year class (despite what some whiners on ratemyprofessor may have to say), nor was the material (but having taken 405 already and taking 413 at the same time certainly left lots of crossover for me. I guess it would be more challenging if someone was taking this before 307 and any stats courses. The department really should work on fixing prerequisites). My only regret? We didn’t get to cover neural networks. The savior? You can get extra credit in this course by doing a presentation. Whereas most people opted to just sum up a chapter we had already seen, some of us presented new material. My friend Dave presented something on Watson (the Jeopardy robot), I did a presentation on neural networks (which forced me to research and learn about them), and my friend Rhiannon did a presentation on a cool lyric-generating project.
