Term 2 courses Jan - April 2011

Term 1 grades are all out now, it was a great term!
Term 1 courses:
Cpsc 312 (functional and logic programming) - Kurt Eiselt
Cpsc 304 (intro to databases) - George Tsiknis
Psych 367 (Sensory systems) - Deborah Giaschi
Cogs 303 (research methods)- Ron Rensink
Phil 451 (phil of mind) - Murat Aydede

I thought all of the profs I had for the 1st term were excellent.
    Kurt's classes were non-sleep inducing just as I remembered it from Cpsc 111. 312 was an interesting course. We learned Haskell and Prolog and we were assigned to implement programs that were ... engaging? Most of them were to help solve puzzles - Rush hour, Oska, Sudoku, Clue.
   George had wonderful lecture notes and was nice enough to reschedule my final exam because of exam hardship. (despite telling him one week instead of one month in advance) I landed myself into a great team and we worked well together and as a result ended up with a great final library database we're all proud of (I think) the format of the course was very similar to 211 (which I also took with George)
    Ron made cogs 303 an extremely interesting and useful course, he also valued and encouraged criticism on the course to make it better every year. The format of the course was different from any other course I've taken at ubc. We're separated into two groups at the beginning of the term and changed tables often so we were all able to meet and work with fellow cogs majors. The majority of the course consists of writing short essays, searching for articles that matched what we were learning, presentations and assessing other students' work. I highly recommend this course. You will learn a variety of useful skills - mainly critical thinking and public presentations/speaking.
   Philosophy 451 was the second philosophy course I've ever taken - the other was phil 220 which was in so many levels different from 451. This course was largely based on reading papers about the mind... Philosophers we focused on were Descartes, Kripke, Kim, Smart, Jackson etc...It consisted of sitting in class, listening to Murat talk, a midterm, paper and a final. The course was difficult in a sense that the concepts in the papers were hard to understand for me.. Otherwise, a word of advice, do the readings and discuss with someone who knows what the papers are about.
   Psych 367 - typical psych course? I thought prof Giaschi was a great lecturer. Course consisted of a small straight forward research project done throughout the term with 5 other team members, a midterm and a final. Do well on the research project it's an easy grade booster. What I didn't like was the scaling they did in the end. I lost 2% = (
    

Courses I am taking this term:

Cogs 402 (Supervised research project in a Cognitive Systems-related laboratory) - Dr.Khan (supervisor)
Cpsc 320 (Intermediate Algorithm Design and Analysis)- Patrice Belleville
Cpsc 322 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence)- Frank Hutter
Psych 361 (Motivation)- Catharine Winstanley

And hopefully some self study with Japanese since I'll be going there after this term!

Perhaps I'll come back and give a short review on these courses before I leave and forget.

Bessie