Due to Covid-19, the university is in the process of transitioning away from all face-to-face course instruction as of Monday March 16th, with this then likely to continue through the summer term.
For ECE 535, we were largely through the major portion of the lecture notes.
As of Tues. March 17th to the end of term there will be no ECE 535 lectures.
We still have important material to be covered. Hence, you will need to go through the lecture slides on your own for:
- Chapter 3: the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm slides (slide 121-126 of the Chapter 3 lecture notes)
- Chapter 4: focusing on the Parzen window and kn-nearest neighbor non-parametric approaches to estimating distributions from data, as well as the metric definition and nearest-neighbor classification. Chapter 4 lecture notes are 39 slides in total.
- Chapter 9: focusing on the No Free Lunch and Ugly Duckling theorems (the first 39 slides from the Chapter 9 lecture notes).
The remaining Chapter 9 lecture slides (slide 40-121) will not be covered – although you are free to read through theses on your own as they do cover some useful materials with respect to data analytics and pattern recognition.
Assignments (ECE 485):
For the ECE 485 class, Chapter 3 and 4 assignments will be posted, along with an additional Matlab assignment will also be created – replacing what would have been the Chapter 9 assignment. In that assignment the ECE 485 students will be required to submit the assignment as a Matlab Live Script file that can be executed and run on our side with their mark coming from the results produced from their Live Script when we run it.
This Live Script approach will likely be used as part of the final exam – so you as ECE 535 students may also want to get some practice at creating Matlab Live Scripts and making sure that they run correctly prior to the final exam.
If you have not used Matlab’s Live Scripting capabilities then you may want to look at https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/create-live-scripts.html?s_tid=srchtitle and try using the Matlab capability (which is similar to Jupyter notebooks (https://jupyter.org/) which are being widely used in industry and academia to support data analytics work).
Student copies of matlab are available from: https://matlab.engr.uvic.ca/
This allows you to run matlab on your computer but it does require that you vpn into UVic in order to access the matlab license server. UVic’s vpn process can be found at: https://www.uvic.ca/systems/services/internettelephone/remoteaccess/index.php
Final Exam:
There will still be a final in the course – the exact date and time of which is still in the process of being determined. I am still working through exactly how this will be best structured, completed, and submitted as it will not be face-to-face exam format.
Likely it will be some form of exam which you will download from the course web site then have a set time to complete before uploading a scanned copy of your answers, i.e., with the scanning part supported for example through one of the many smartphone document scanning apps. Likely some of the questions on the exam will involve needing to develop and then submit a Matlab Live Script solution to the problem – which we will then run on our side to determine your grade for that (or those) question(s). (hence, the practice at this via the above Live Script assignment)
The details of this though will be worked out over the next couple of weeks and announced via the course web site and via the class list emails once they are finalized.
The final exam will cover all material up to and including slide 39 of the Chapter 9 lecture notes.
Course Project:
The course project remains unchanged – although you will submit your final critique document electronically via email as a pdf. The submission date for this will remain unchanged and be the same date as originally scheduled for the final exam.
We may (or may not) have the project seminar – I am still working through how this might be best supported and will email the class and put a notice on the course web site once there is an appropriate solution for this.
If you have not sent in your paper to me as yet – such that I can check if it is appropriate for the project – please do so. Ensure that you but “ECE 535” in the email subject line as well as “project paper”. For those of you who have submitted their paper, I am still going through these and will get back to you over the next day or so.
Office Hours:
I am also exploring the best method(s) of supporting non-face-to-face office hours, i.e., via an appropriate teleconferencing solution – but this is not yet in place. Once how this will be done is put in place then I will email the class and put a notice on the course web site.
Course Grading:
As the assignment and final will still go ahead, although in modified forms, the overall course grading scheme will remain unchanged.