Introduction

In recent years, the EECS/CS majors have become heavily impacted, leading to many students not being able to enroll in many courses. Consequently, the initial course path students choose have a heavy impact on their academic future, and path deviations are costly. This Decal is offered with the goal of providing students with a broad survey of EECS and a general sense of courses and subfields within the major.

Professor Sahai notes in his unofficial advice page, “Set yourself a goal of understanding some system from top to bottom before you graduate. For example, you might want to know how the entire process of downloading and listening to an MP3 or OGG file works. This can be a good tool for integrating knowledge across different courses.” While taking all of the courses may be infeasible under the current system, we would like to provide a cocktail-party level of understanding.

Course Overview

This course will take students on a journey through Youtube starting from the browser request to the underlying circuitry and physics. In addition, staff will plan trips to various research labs or host talks by current researchers in the fields to provide deeper insight into various areas of research. The syllabus itself covers 11 weeks of instruction, with an additional 12th week as a guest lecture by either faculty or a current researcher.

Each week will move lower on the Software/Hardware stack, with a deconstructive approach to software and a constructive one towards hardware. Sessions will consist of 2 hours of instruction, with interleaved interactive demonstrations and lecture. Attendance and weekly submissions will both be work 1 point each, and a total of 20 points as well as an overarching project is required to receive a Pass.

Assignments

Students are required to submit a short written assignment every week (200-500 words) about a product or large-scale project outside of the course which makes use of the technologies discussed during the current week. In addition, students need to submit an “overarching project” which consists of taking a large project and decomposing it into the technologies that we discuss through the course of the course.