CSE Undergrad News

We will leave this blog up for reference, but note that this is being retired and replaced by the new EdStem discussion board that all students should have access to moving forward. If you have any questions, please reach out to the Ugrad Advising team.

Hello Allen School Students!  A few first day notes:

First, some good news for a change!

• Hector, our awesome front desk employee at the Gates Center has officially joined onto the CSE advising team.  He will still be working the front desk when we return to the building, but he’ll also be helping the advising team directly now, so you may hear from him directly with answers to your questions as he learns more about our team. Yay for Hector!

And some house keeping notes:

• If you are emailing the advising team this week asking for our help in a registration issue, please remember to include your full name, student number and sln’s of the courses you need help with (to drop/add) as that will help us get you answers faster.
• Also note the online dropins that we referenced yesterday: https://www.cs.washington.edu/academics/ugrad/advising, some students pointed out that they don’t have access to gmail chat, in that case, watch your email for updates with the Zoom link.

We hope everyone has a relatively smooth start to the quarter. Remember your CSE Advising team is here for you.

Crystal, Pim, Jenifer, Maggie, Chloe, Lesley, Chelsea, and Hector

Dear CSE students:

These are some wild times that we are living through right now. You’ve received a cascade of messages about the fast changing landscape we are all confronting right now.  I hope that this email will follow on to the one Magda sent out yesterday with some additional relevant information. Here are some key messages we need you all to hear:

1. Many students are asking: “Can I be overloaded into the course I want now that everything is online?”
   1. The answer, generally speaking, is no, and here’s why.  Just because we don’t have room restrictions, doesn’t mean we don’t have other types of resource restrictions, mainly TA’s.  While we are actively working on adding more space to several of our courses, we will not be ramping up space in a big way. The exception is if you are trying to graduate in spring and can’t get into a course you need to graduate. In that case, you should reach out to ugrad-advisor@cs with your unique situation. Everyone else should continue to monitor the NotifyUW system.  I do expect students will drop classes in the first week as they do every quarter.
2. We are also receiving questions from students asking if they can register for courses that meet at the same time. Since not every instructor will be recording lectures, the general answer to this is also no.  There are exceptions in rare situations, but you need to work that out directly with faculty using the Registration Transaction Form .
3. We will be having ‘virtual quick questions’ during spring quarter.  You’ll receive information later this week on how to access that but you will need to have access to your Gmail chat function using your @cs email address.  If you’re bored at home (and yes, you really SHOULD be staying at home), please get that set up and working as soon as possible. We will be sending the Zoom links for dropins to your @cs chat accounts when you are up next in the queue.
4. Please note in Magda’s email there was a message about the UW Laptop Lending program.  You needed to fill that out by today at noon, so hopefully you already did that.  Additionally, please reach out directly to advising at ugrad-advisor@cs.washington.edu if you do not think you can participate in spring courses due to limitations in your available technology. We are committed to working with you to find a way to make next quarter as accessible as possible
5. Many of you are asking if the CSE graduation event will take place.  At this point, we do not have any information on that subject. We’ll certainly let you know as soon as we do, but at this point we are focused on getting spring quarter off to a good start.
6. We appreciate your patience as your advising team does everything we can to address all the questions that our constantly changing situation is bringing forward.  We will do our best to be there for you as we always are in the best of times.

Thank you and stay tuned for further updates.

Sincerely,

CSE Advising: Crystal, Jenifer, Maggie, Leslie, Chelsea, Hector, Chloe and Pim

Our first Ugrad Lunch with the new Director of the Allen School, Magda Balazinska will be next Tuesday the 21st from noon to 1 in the Zillow Commons (4th floor of the Gates Center).  This event is open to all current CSE undergraduates.  Please RSVP by this Thursday (using your CSE google account) so we can get a count for food.  There will be pizza and lots of time to ask our new director questions. We look forward to seeing you there!

We are going through graduation applications and it seems that many students are not understanding that the last 60 credits you take for your UW degree need to be here at UW (this does not include official UW study abroad).

There is an exception for up to 15 credits taken via distance learning, community college transfer, etc, but beyond that is generally not allowed. If you are taking a course at a local community college in your last two years after matriculating at UW, you need to be aware of this restriction and check with advising before assuming it is okay. You also need to be really careful with distance learning courses.  Here is a link to the UW page with the official explanation of Residence Credit.

https://www.washington.edu/uaa/advising/academic-planning/terms-and-policies/

Residence Credits

To graduate with a baccalaureate degree, a student must complete at least 45 credits in residence at the UW. Residence credits are UW credits earned through the campus granting the degree.

In addition, 45 of the last 60 credits must be taken in residence; this is referred to as the final-year residence requirement. The idea is that in order to earn a UW degree, the majority of your final courses — which are usually upper division courses in your major — should be taken through the UW. These courses may be part of a study abroad program as long as the courses are offered as part of a UW program. Exceptions to the final-year residence rule may be made by each individual college.

Residence credit includes:

• Day and evening courses from the quarterly time schedule at the student’s home UW campus, including fieldwork and individual-study courses that don’t require that the student be on campus, but not including C-prefix or DL-prefix online learning courses
• Evening Degree Program courses
• Credit courses offered by UW Professional and Continuing Education taken by students in good academic standing, except C-prefix and DL-prefix online learning courses
• Foreign study credit earned through UW-sponsored International Programs and Exchanges that are recorded on the transcript as UW credit

Residence credit does not include:

• Transfer courses
• UW online learning courses, including both UW C-prefix and DL-prefix courses
• Any UW courses taken by students on drop status
• UW-Bothell or UW-Tacoma credits, for students matriculated at the Seattle campus, and vice-versa. Only credits earned at the campus granting the degree are considered residence credits.
• AP and International Baccalaureate credit
• Advanced placement credit
• Credit by examination
• College in the High School, including courses sponsored by UW Professional and Continuing Education
• Armed Forces Training School credit
• Foreign study credit that appears on the student’s transcript as transfer credit

PUTNAM MATHEMATICAL
COMPETITION

Weekly meetings:

Mondays, 6-8PM, Padelford C-36
starting on Monday, September 30

Competition date: Saturday, December 1
Practice Exam: Monday, October 7
Learn problem solving skills in:

Combinatorics
Number T heory
Geometry and T rigonometry
Sequences and Series
F unctional Relations

Algebra

For more information, see the Putnam at UW page
http://sites.math.washington.edu/∼putnam/putpage.html
and the Math 342, The Art of Problem Solving page
http://sites.math.washington.edu/∼putnam/math342.html

Faculty Contact/Sponsors:

Prof. Julia Pevtsova, julia@math.washington.edu Prof. Jonah Ostroff,

ostroff@uw.edu

Hello CSE Students!

Attention graduating CSE majors!

If you are graduating at the end of this fall, winter or spring quarter, it’s time to file for graduation!  First, please check your degree audit in your MyPlan  to see if you have a projected graduation date. If you do, you’re good to go. If you don’t, please follow the steps below to apply to graduate online. This means that you will only need to physically come in to advising to talk about graduation if you have extensive questions.  Everyone needs to first fill out this survey, regardless of questions.

There are four steps:

1. Go to your MyPlan and enter all the courses you plan to take until you graduate and run a Degree Audit.
2. Update your Co-Op/Internship and Scholarship Information by using the MyCSE page, which will allow us to update our records on where our students worked before graduating. This information is kept in an internal CSE database.  Please make sure to email ugrad-advisor@cs if you did paid research with CSE faculty and it’s not showing up in the MyCSE system.  Include your student number, faculty research contact, number of hours/week worked and title of your project.
3. Fill out our CSE Graduating Student Online Form. You must login with your CSE Gmail Account Credentials.  Please do this as soon as you are confident you know your graduation quarter.
4. After we file your graduation application (we’ll have hundreds to process so likely mid-Sept is when we will complete this process), we will send you a summary email and you will receive an email from the graduation office sent to your @uw account regarding your graduation application. You must open that email and confirm your graduation application before it will be entered into the system. 

If you are pursuing a double major or double degree, you’ll need to file graduation paperwork with your other department as well.

You do NOT need to come in for an appointment if you fill out the above form. We will contact you if we have questions or concerns.

Thank you!

~CSE Advising

FYI: Starting in Fall 2019, we will have a new course number, 492,  for 400 level seminars. Seminars are usually graded credit/no credit. The CSE 490 number will be used for special topics or new course offerings (usually graded). This will hopefully alleviate some of the confusion between traditional courses and seminars.

• Graded CSE 490 courses always count as CSE senior electives, but not always core.

• 492 seminars: students may petition to have either one credit of seminar or 2 credits of CSE 301 (Internships credit) apply to their CSE senior electives, but not both.  This is often helpful if a student is 1 or 2 credits short of required CSE Senior Electives

Cryptography Course – CSE 490c New Fall 2019 (Core Course, 4 credits)

Prereqs: 312 and 332

Cryptography provides important tools for ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive digital data. Core cryptographic tools, such as encryption and digital signature, are used daily behind millions of online transactions, and form the basis for more advanced cryptographic systems, such as, cryptocurrency.

This course gives an introduction to cryptography, by focusing on the design and application of selected important cryptographic objects. For each cryptographic object, we formalize its functionality and security requirements (also known as security definitions), present schemes that achieve the desired functionality, and explain why they are secure.

Overall, we aim to survey the cryptography landscape, train cryptographic thinking, and convey proper usage of important cryptographic tools.

CSE 490 R: 4 credits,  (Will move to CSE 478 number soon) (core course or CSE senior elective): Autonomous robots

Prereqs: 332 required, Math 308 (recommended) and CSE 312 (recommended)

Autonomous Robots delves into the building blocks of autonomous systems that operate in the wild. We will cover topics related to state estimation (bayes filtering, probabilistic motion and sensor models), control (feedback, Lyapunov, LQR, MPC), planning (roadmaps, heuristic search, incremental densification) and online learning. Students will be forming teams and implementing algorithms on 1/10th sized rally cars as part of their assignments. Concepts from all of the assignments will culminate into a final project with a demo on the rally cars. The course will involve programming in a Linux and Python environment along with ROS for interfacing to the robot.

CSE 490 G1 , 4 credits, (linked to CSE 599): Introduction to Deep Learning: (CSE Senior Elective, core course)

Prereqs: 446 OR 455 OR 416

Description: A survey class of neural network implementation and applications. Topics include: optimization – stochastic gradient descent, adaptive and 2nd order methods, normalization; convolutional neural networks – image processing, classification, detection, segmentation; recurrent neural networks – semantic understanding, translation, question-answering; cross-domain applications – image captioning, vision and language.