Logistics

Important Links

Grading

This class will involve a great amount of discussion with time devoted to lecture, zoom activities, student presentations, and prototyping. Grades will reflect performance on reports, paper presentations, participation, and the final project.  During presentations and discussions in the Monday sections, students are expected to participate actively. 

Grading breakdown:

Team peer evaluations will be conducted for each of the Final Project milestones and can influence an individual student’s grade by +/-5%. Teammates should take great care to communicate with each other and to equitably contribute to the project!

Attendance:

Attendance is part of the participation grade. Students are expected to attend ALL of the Monday discussion sections (except W1, W2, and W7). Please arrive on time and be ready to interact with peers as much as possible.  If students must miss a Monday section for an excusable reason, let your presentation partners and section leaders (IA) know IN ADVANCE; the team can prerecord their talk or give the talk without the missing member. Students who miss on Monday can make up for their participation score by adding a comment to your section's slack channel. 

Students are expected to attend most of the Tuesday/Thursday lectures. We will be keeping attendance through a digital check-in process. Students can miss up to 5 lectures (25%) with no negative impacts on the overall grade. For each lecture missed beyond 5, students will lose 0.5% of the participation grade (e.g., with 7 absences, students drop 1% independent of how much they participated). 

Late Assignments:

It is vitally important to keep up with paper discussions and projects in order to participate fully.  If students miss a presentation, it will negatively affect your peers since they will not get to learn about that paper from you.  Late submissions for project milestones will get feedback slower, which will be important for doing well on the next stage. 

Work with your Presenting groups and Final Project teams to stay on schedule.  Please try to avoid missing Monday presentations, but if you must, work with your partners to prerecord the slides. See the Discussions page for more details.  

Make-up quizzes:

Students will have a full 24 hours to complete quizzes after Thursday's lecture until Friday evening (with one hour maximum to submit answers). These will be "open book" quizzes so you may refer to the papers and your notes during the quiz period. If you absolutely cannot finish the quiz during this time frame, you must reach out the the TAs before the quiz period to arrange a makeup quiz, which must be completed within 5 days. Makeup quizzes can earn up to 50% of the full credit for the quiz.

Teams

You will work on teams for paper presentations as well as for the final project. Teamwork is complicated! We appreciate that part of the challenge in this class will be figuring out how to work with people that have different work styles, time zones, backgrounds, and experiences. Keep in mind these points as you develop a relationship with your team.

References and Cheating

In all your work in this class, you should utilize and cite any sources of information you can: search results, news sources, scholarly papers, personal contacts, and outside faculty. Acknowledge them with specific footnotes or hyperlinks. Specify each source well enough that a reader can find it. We will reward you for using/citing sources and penalize you for using none. If you cut and paste content from elsewhere, use quotation marks and footnotes. Not acknowledging your citations is an ethical failure, but failing to seek help limits your effectiveness.

Presenting groups are not allowed to view slides from other sections; any attempt to simply copy another group will be consider a violation of academic integrity. Likewise, students are not to share or discuss the quiz questions with any other students. Students shall not leverage an LLM (e.g. ChatGPT, BARD, Gemini, etc).

Should any student be found guilty of cheating on an assignment, the University will be notified. Additionally, depending on the circumstances, and at the discretion of the instructor and the Department Head, a student could fail the course and may be expelled from the University. A student can appeal any faculty decision to the UC San Diego Academic Senate.

Special Needs

If you are will be missing class for religious reasons, let us know during the first week of class and it will not be penalized. If you have a disability and wish to request an accommodation, please contact the Office for Students with Disabilities. We will be happy to work with you to support your success in the class.

Time Allocation

As a rough weekly time allocation, students should set aside 2-3 hours per week for reading and preparing presentations. Dedicate an hour for participate in Slack discussions  (or participate verbally during the live discussion sections!).  Devote 1-2 hours per week for final project work.  Project work will likely ramp up towards the last few weeks of class. 

Text books

There is no official text book for the course. If you like to buy books, we recommend the following: