Summary of CEAS Evaluations & Student comments

For Kambhampati's courses Spring 1999-curent

 

For each course, the students' written comments on the CEAS evaluation sheets in response to the question "What did you like most about this course?" are listed below. (To find out the answers to "What did you like least about this course?" you will just have to take the course)[1]

 

You can also check out my Last Lecture ;-)

 

CSE571 [Fall 2023] Introduction to AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.60 Course:4.39

 

23.  What did you like most about this course?


This class gave me the confidence and the foundation to be able to explore AI on my own. Before this class I was basically wandering aimlessly, not knowing what to do. Now, I feel confident and prepared to explore and learn about AI. Dr. Rao knows his stuff, and it shows. There are few classes that I feel so comfortable in just because I know I can trust everything that the instructor says. This is one of those classes. Dr. Rao links the concepts together beautifully and manages to progress all the way from first principles to modern bleeding edge concepts in a way that is very satisfactory as far as relevance to modern techniques. Every opinion he gives is well-formed and is well rooted in fact and reason.

 

The way professor relates LLM's with basic AI techniques.


The in depth applications of foundational AI and reinforcement learning was a great thing to learn and projects proved to be very beneficial.


The information discussed was very good and was clearly up-to-date with the latest developments in AI

 


The offline lectures and Profs enthusiasm. professor is awesome

Professor inspires to learn more and research new ideas. Pre-recorded lecture and doubt clearing class format

Very useful for the career. Lot of learning. Demanding course but totally worth it. Best course and the professor.



Teaching and teaching only. Mr Rao is a gem of a teacher.


I loved the way professor put his ideas clearly and help us understand the topics and most importantly he tries to connect the missing dots and helps us relate them to different topics for better understanding.


The thing I liked the most about the Subject was that it was related to topics that are currently trending. Like for e.g., we were taught about LLMs, ChatGPT, etc., which are currently hot topics in AI, and also how he cleared the misconception about AI, and how it's much more than just using models and training on preprocessed models like Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc.


The professor explained the concepts very clearly and made me understand that every topic is connected and are not disconnected lessons. The witty jokes made about AI concepts kept me engaged and were also thought provoking. The assignments were of a very high standard and were very useful to practice what concepts were learnt in the class


Professor's energy and enthusiasm about the subject.



The course covered a lot of important topics in AI and gave solid examples with real world applications. It definitely helped me learn a lot about the world of AI and everything that goes into it.


Topics.


I particularly enjoyed the instructor's effective communication style throughout the course. He usually tried to attach real-world stuff with the course topics.

The instructor's passion for the subject matter was evident, and it greatly contributed to creating an engaging learning environment.

The way complex concepts were explained with clarity made the material much more accessible.


I appreciate the way we were taught all of the topics in a top-down fashion, like we started with the most general kind of topic i.e. search algorithms, then we moved on to game trees, reinforcement learning and supervised/unsupervised learning which kind of seemed like specials cases of earlier topics. For instance: MDP was a strict generalisation of A* Search.

I liked the way all of the topics were being related to real life scenarios so that we can feel that AI is already a major part of lives, it’s just that we didn’t have sufficient knowledge to notice these intricacies earlier.

 

I appreciate that we were also taught about propositional logic so that we can know how the actual reasoning stuff is happening in the Large Language Models which are now becoming a major part of our lives. I have also taken Knowledge Representation and Reasoning course this semester, so I was able to correlate well between this course and the KRR (CSE579) course.

 

I am really motivated by the breadth of topics we have covered throughout this course. Even though there are topics we covered in a very short span of time but the main thing is that we are at least aware of the topic. I believe that such kind of awareness really helps us in the long run if we are planning to stick to the field.

 

I liked the professor’s approach to watch most of the lectures online because it gave us the freedom to watch and understand the lectures in our own pace.


Professor Subbarao is excellent, and his unique teaching style draws people to his class. His lectures are thought provoking, and the knowledge he imparts is extremely valuable, considering that Artificial Intelligence is taking the world by storm.


The professors method of teaching is very impressive. I liked the course curriculum and understanding of the main concepts .


Professor Rao's references and jokes during the class and how they are connected to the concepts. The topics covered are interesting.

The pre-recorded videos given by professor were highly useful in understanding the concepts before the actual class.


The content. I feel like I finally know something about AI. The professor

The course structure covers most of the core concepts of AI which are relevant to industry levels.


The instructor was enthusiastic about teaching the course and made sure to cover all details of the topics covered.


Very Knowledgeable instructor with many real examples


It was a deep dive into AI, not just superficially. The teaching was very good.


The way Professor Subbarao teaches. He makes the courses difficult but the his method of explaining topics was very nice.


This course introduced me to the world of AI, so the class was indeed very interesting and thought-provoking.


The way Prof. Rao connected all the concepts and established the background for each concept rather than just explaining the algorithm was the thing I liked the most.


The way of teaching


I was interested in the course since the beginning.


Even though the course covers everything in AI, the instructor has enough depth and understanding, so I am able to understand many things which I wouldn't otherwise.

course content is well distributed, covering many important topics in AI.


In the beginning the professors teaching style scared me a little bit, but as the semester progressed, I started liking it. In the beginning I did not like watching the Youtube lectures, but I think that really stimulated my thinking.


Prof. Rao's slightly uncanny teaching demeanour was great for grabbing your attention, I enjoyed going to class and felt that I learnt quite a bit just from the once a week in person meetings alone


How the professor connected all the topics.


I liked the huge variety of concepts taught in the course, with a lot of parallels drawn to


industry-standard models and real life applications of every concept taught in class. Dr. Rao is a fantastic professor with real passion for the subject and the unwavering will to percolate as much knowledge as he can to his students. The course materials, projects and homeworks were also very apt in further strengthening understanding of the course. Overall this is the course I have learnt the most throughout my educational experience.


The professor has a wide range of knowledge in AI and I have waited 2 semesters for this professor, luckily Professor has taken this subject this semester.


Discussions


Honestly, I loved everything about the course. I am a robotics student, and this was our core course. Professor Rao is an excellent instructor and the material and modules he covered in the class are awesome. He didn't only discuss the modules but he also discussed various philosophical & practical aspects of Artificial intelligence. He also covered some recent advancements in the domain of artificial intelligence and machine learning such as ChatGPT and various Large Language Models.


Interactions with students.


the knowledge I gained from the course.


How deep it went into each topic, the projects, Class discussions.


The amount of content in this course makes you push your limits and learn. The unexpected amount of stuff I Learned.

Professor teaches the course in the most interesting way and the topics were good too.


This course had a very different approach then rest of the courses. Major plus point is that this course gave real world applications.


The Problem Sets and how they helped me prepare for the exam

 


 


The professor is obviously very knowledgeable about the subject. When he speaks, it is evident. All the lectures were recorded, so that was convenient. The professor emphasized the connections between concepts we learned about. It helped the semester feel more coherent.


 

24. Comments

This is perhaps the greatest class I have taken at ASU in my 5 years here, despite being one of the most demanding. It is a treasure and one of the shining jewels of the SCAI department here. It is absolutely the one that gives me the most confidence to move into the real world and apply what I have learned there. I give a heartfelt thank you to Dr. Rao and the rest of the instructional team for running this class. I can genuinely say it has changed my outlook on programming and AI.

 

 


This is the best course I have taken and I don't think any course in ASU CS department will come near this, in terms of the breadth it covers. I liked this course a lot and would love to have more courses like this. Professor Subbarao is just amazing.

 


very good course with excellent professor.

Overall the course was good.

AI Rocks!

Overall it was a very fun and engaging class! Good course - worth it.

It is a hard and demanding course


Wonderful course taught by Mr Rao. Extraordinary curriculum and wonderful Teaching. Overall, it was a great course with in-depth knowledge of AI.

Very good course overall.


This is an excellent course and I would recommend to fellow students that are interested in the world of AI.



NA


It was a good standup comedy show.


This class would have been better as an in person class not as a recorded lecture class with an in person discussion session.


The class was very informative and demanding, professor was well prepared and interactive with the class. Would have liked to know how the grading was being done earlier on. Apart from that everything about the course was good!


Learned a lot in this course N/A

One of the most needed courses in my academic life, since the material is really needed and crucial for every one. Even if some think they dont need this course.




Great course but a bit difficult.


I was very happy taking this course under prof. Rao was he very enthusiastically taught all topics giving real-life examples to help us understand the concepts better.


Loved the class, learned a lot.


The Instructor is very good, if student really wants to learn AI.

I wish many other courses are taught by this instructor, but alas teaching is a self less work in the world of research.


Hope Prof Rao takes some more specialized courses in fields of AI over the next semesters, would want to take a course like that personally


Overall it is a good course, enjoyed throughout the semester.


Overall, great course, and a great instrcutor. I have learned more about AI in this class than any other class at any other college in my life.


Initially for the first 4-5 weeks, I did not like the subject at all. Did not like the way Professor Rao taught and could not understand anything. Realized I was the problem and wasn't putting much effort into the course somewhere around week10. It is my first time being taught this way, learning for the sake of gaining knowledge instead of for exams. It was cool, I grew a lot in this course, through failure and introspection and your enthusiasm for the subject and to make sure that we are understanding made me feel like, "He is working harder and cares more than me to make sure that I learn something. So Why not give it another try?"and found something I wanted to pursue as a career. The field is so interesting and vast and made me really appreciate people who pursue PhD and research work in General. In the end, what I mean to say is that the course was excellent but I believe it was you, your facts such as Connecting everything while learning and other stuff and your personality that had an impact in me changing for the better. I do not know the benefits/effects of this course going forward but although I may not pursue a PhD (Still thinking about it cuz I am not a bright one you see), I will make sure to do something different. Thank You.

 

Cool class, I probably liked it as much as I did because of the connections the professor drew between subject matters. I liked that we spent time looking at things other than just ChatGPT. Feels like a lot sometimes, especially with watching lecture videos at home.


Enjoyed the class for sure.

 

 

CSE574 [Fall 2022] Planning & Learning Methods in AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse574]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.64 Course:4.32

 

23.

What did you like most about this course?

Rao is awesome!!!!!! Seriously the best professor I've ever had


Dr. Rao is an absolute legend. Having taken him twice now, I can say that ASU is blessed to have him as faculty, and I am blessed to have had him twice. He's great. He's the heart of the course. Without him, this course is so much less.

The way the professor taught the subject and concepts


Prof. Rao tries to clear each and every doubt before moving forward with the class. And also gives enough supplementary content to understand the course better.


The course content was absolutely fantastic. I doubt any course has taught me or pushed me as much. I liked the content so much so that I'm trying to pursue a PhD in related areas. I also really liked that the class pushed us to read papers.

I am really glad we got to learn about all different kinds of planning. I think I learned a lot about the field and can take that with me no matter what realm of AI I go into. I love the connection between RL and planning as people don't usually think of that often. I also liked reviewing papers as I felt I could understand a whole lot more of the breadth of the field that way.


In-depth coverage of course topics

Prof introduced us to the topic and then took us to the next level where we were thinking on our own. That's a big deal in a single semester.


The professor was too good in explaining the topics and motivating students to explore the subject. The classes, although being long, were interesting mainly because of the professor's style of teaching.

Course content is so novel and adapting to the contemporary standards withstanding the test of time. Similarities and differences between different schools of thought was an eye opener.


The course sub topics based on a comparison between planning and learning.

Instructor did a great job connecting ideas from seemingly disparate parts of computer science. Rao himself. He's great. The material is extremely interesting as well.


Course Concepts

Paper reading assignments. This course created a very good habit of reading too many research papers.

Instructor has a lot of knowledge on the course and shares further readings always. His teaching style shows his enthusiasm towards the subject.


Gives an entire new perspective to look at the research and publishes.

Personally I was most interested in the future directions of the course (especially abstraction and hierarchy), and several of the research papers such as Kushing's preference learning paper, planning from pixels, or Konidaris and Kaelbling.

 

The best thing about this class is how Dr. Kambhampati goes super in-depth into any questions that students have and how the concepts he elaborates upon connect across all sorts of domains in-and-out of AI. I had a class with him last year so I knew what to expect each Friday during the double lectures; even so, everything was new and presented in a different light (even if it was a lot to learn at first, the past 20 years of his classes are all available on YouTube/audio). That being said, Dr. Kambhampati is, by far, the most-dedicated professor I've had at ASU.

�Cheers!

 

 

25.

Comments


There isn't much else to say, nor am I qualified to say if there is anything else to improve upon -- this class is basically Prof 'Kambhampati's Research: The class', which in my opinion is what most graduate-level classes should be. This was much closer to a seminar class than a regular rotation class, which is quite excellent.

If I had taken this course at a different point in my academic career, I would have gotten so much more out of it. Unfortunately, the fault of any issues does not actually lie with the instructor here. I had a lot of personal issues, a rocky transition, and extreme burnout that contributed. I wish I could take this course maybe 2 years down the line when I am settled in and have things worked through and re-experience and relearn this material.

The coursework and the professor were awesome This class was amazing.


This was a pretty good class, and I learned a lot!

Dr. Rao is an great professor who comes to each lecture with in-depth knowledge and expertise on the subject matter. The only critique I have would be that he discusses topics at great lengths on occasion, which results in not being able to get through the day's slides.


Would be interested if Prof. taught more grad courses in future semesters.

Prof is extremely enthusiastic but a solid experience with the background content is needed to excel in this course


The grad teaching staff is also another highlight! Learning from them every few classes was interesting since I got to hear different perspectives on similar concepts within temporal planning, per se, aside from the theoretical perspective from class. Hearing about their work often made my day, since I got to see how to apply what I learned in class (in the near future). Shoutout Prof. Sreedharan, Sriram, and Karthik :)

Prof. Kambhampati is a great teacher. I am glad I took this course. I am incredibly grateful to have taken this class! :)

 

CSE471 [Fall 2021] Intro to AI (Honors Section)

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.62 Course:4.45

 

23. What did you like most about this course?

o   Nearly everything. Professor Rao is one of the nicest professors I've had the fortune of taking a class with. This class was a substantial amount of work, and had actually quite difficult material, which is not something I have seen before here. The pace also felt quite nice, it's one of the few classes that I did not feel were too slow.

o   Professor Rao himself was one of the best parts of this class, his humor was appreciated, and it's amazing how accessible he was - I would say that the lunches with students was possibly the most a professor has done for outreach. Additionally, the projects were also really quite interesting.

o   Dr. Kambhampati is probably the best professor I've ever had: he cares about his students and their understanding of the material, but he also takes time to teach us stuff he finds interesting. There's always a new connection to the world outside of AI each class, whether it be a literary quote or a real-life application of the course content. It really keeps the course interesting when one class could be pure stats with a small interstitial portion about a funny AI joke, or a quip we get later on in the same class. Alongside this, he makes sure to learn each student's name, which makes the difference in asking questions about class content. It's made me more passionate about learning new things in CS, so I'm pretty happy that I was able to take it this semester.

o   Everything. Literally everything. I am so glad that Dr. Rao offered me a place in his class when I wasn't a Barrett student. I've been loving everything about this class, and it has definitely inspired me to continue my love of A.I. and Robotics.

o   I certainly liked how it was accessible to all Barrett students. The overview of many topics of AI definitely guided my interests and helped me decide my future.

o   I really liked professor Rao himself. His enthusiasm made the class a joy.

o   I liked that it was hard and it didnt feel like a waste of time like every single CS class in previous semesters

o   I really liked learning about these concepts and ideas behind artificial intelligence, and I really appreciated that the instructor spoke in an energetic manner and really showed that he was invested and cared about the topic.

o   Classes are entertaining, and the topics are interesting. The professor has a great sense of humor, too.

o   This is a fascinating topic. I appreciated the small class, something I have never experienced in my time at the Fulton schools.

o   Professor's ability to relate different topics together throughout the course. Lots of resources/previous lectures available.

o   I enjoyed Dr. Khambhampati's passion for the subject and his energy

o   The depth by which the professor went in to the theoretical topics of AI and the genuine interest he had in teaching the subject matter

o   The course was interesting, and I found Dr. Rao to be very educated on the subject. Dr. Rao's lectures were very straightforward, which I appreciated. We tackled important topics in the field of AI, including ethics, without any side-stepping around delicate content.

o   The engaging and challenging nature of the assignments. I appreciated that the course treated us like intelligent and capable students and wasn't afraid of challenging us. The class wasn't hard for the sake of being hard and it never felt like a chore.

o   Professor was very passionate about the course. He really cared about the topics, and the lectures were engaging. I also liked that the professor took much feedback into account during the class.

o   I love all of the topics covered in this course and the method of instruction was phenomenal. Going over analogies and connecting different topics made me understand AI on such a deep level that I will take with me for the rest of my life. Also, the projects were really fun, especially the Pacman ones, and I found that the problem sets were very helpful for me to understand the material.

25. Comments

o   Dr. Rao is a certified legend in my book and is among the most engaging, funny, and interesting professors I have ever had the pleasure of working with. 10/10 if he ever asks to run a class like this again, please let him inspire another generation. The way this class has been run has simultaneously challenged me to think yet kept it controlled. The work load was as expected, and I am quite happy to report that this has been my favorite class at ASU. Ever.

o   Keep on making this course accessible to those willing and able to learn AI, particularly to those who may not be in computer science.

o   I was the person who wrote it was too easy in the first class poll, I liked that it got harder

o   I think this was a good course overall and enjoyed taking it.

o   Overall a very interesting class. The projects were fun to do, and I feel like I learned a great deal during this class.

o   I feel this class expected to cover too much. This is not a bad thing at all; but this is one of those classes you'd need an extra half semester to get everything to the degree of detail I expect Professor Rao wanted - and this is at the 1.5x accelerated pace we're on. I would still be willing to do that though, that's how much I liked this class.

o   Thanks for taking attendance: I slacked off a bit earlier in the semester, but after I got an email asking why I was a no-show for a few classes it was a wake-up call to get my stuff, and life, together. Realizing that my professors actually care about how their students understand content and engage with their course shifted my perspective on going to class in general -- all for the better. Thanks!

o   This is the most demanding class I have this semester, but it's also the most interesting, and I'm glad I took it and stuck around.

o   Overall, even though this course was very stressful, it was one of my favorite courses overall from my time at ASU. I found that even when I was tired, when I went to this class, I felt energized by all of these concepts and the passion with which the professor conveyed them.

o   I wish this class was taught across two semesters. I think that would've allowed us to have more time with each individual concept while also covering more details from the field.

o   The system where we watch lecture videos before the class and then the class sort of reviews/expands upon the lecture we watched is really good. I feel like I could get a better understanding because it's always easier to absorb knowledge the second time through..

o   The teaching assistants were very helpful.

o   I understand that this course is not taught too often by Dr. Rao, but I think it fit very well as an honors section course

o   Wished there was more time for lectures.

 

 

CSE471 [Fall 2019] Intro to AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.64 Course:4.51

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

 

o   I loved every aspect of the course especially the wide variety of topics that we covered. I have a much better and lasting understanding of various topics of AI.

o   Rao is the best professor I have ever had.

o   Materials covered are interesting and covered with a good amount of depth.

o   The Berkeley Pac-Man projects, although at times frustrating, was fun. In addition, I enjoyed the topics that we cover in class because they are relevant to current technologies and my interest.

o   That the instructor connected AI concepts with life and gave certain examples thay will stay with us forever

o   Deep ideas discussed.

o   The course was structured well that it started from basics and covered most of the cutting edge concepts in the field of AI.

o   I liked the application of the algorithms that were thought. The enthusiasm of the professor was at it's best. Interesting notes that the professor gave for extra information about the subject. Amazing Jokes.

o   I liked how much information was in this class and the relevancy of the topics covered through the semester.

o   I always wanted to take AI under prof. Rao, and the moment I found a chance I did. The course was a lot tougher than a 400 level but this made us spend more time in understanding the concepts and dive in deeper into the logic which was definitely the best thing about this course.

o   The professor was too good and the way he builds the intuition for the topics that he teaches is excellent.

o   Everything about the course is amazing because the professor is too good projects,lectures

o   The subject and the professor's way of teaching it

o   Professor knowledge and enthusiasm to teach. The course covers all the portions of AI

o   This class has been the most engaging class I've ever been in. Dr. Rao clearly has a mastery level understanding of AI, and his ability to use humor and stories to help us understand the material better is bar none. His passion for AI and wanting students to understand the material (instead of just getting good grades on assignments and tests) is a mentality I wish more professor would take.

o   Professor's simple life-relating experiences of concepts

o   The way all the topics are interlinked , projects, professor's jokes and how well they are connected to the topics

o   No time limit on homeworks and them consisting of ideas to explore. The scope for this course wasn't limited whatever is necessary for us to get started with ai prof made sure he taught us that, sometimes even with extra effort. The best thing by far would be the fact prof puts his lectures online I must have gone through then 7-8 times by now. Every time learning new things because everything is connected in his lectures which we don't understand when we listen to it live but once some extra topic is over somethings make more sense in previous lectures and prof himself promotes that explicitly. He is the best professor in ai I have ever seen in my whole life for sure. There were topics which needed some practical or example approach prof always made sure he had dedicately recorded extra examples for that which was no less than epic.

o   One thing i liked the most is the way he connects all the topics he teaches throughout the semester which makes learning faster and this way i feel we can remember lot of things for long time. There are very few professors if not any that i have come across who teaches that way.

o   Projects were challenging yet engaging. The professor definitely knew his material and was super motivated to teach the topic.

o   The enthusiam of the professor in teaching in the course coupled with the application and reasoning-oriented instruction made it really enjoyable. The examples and background for each concept provided by the instructor made it very easy to understand, grasp and apply. The projects and homework assignments in the course provided comprehensive as well as application based understanding of the relevant concepts.

o   The fact that Artificial Intelligence is the emerging hot topic in computer science and learning it will help me stay up to date.

o   Class lectures and projects Interesting topic

o   The expression of ideas by the Professor; Exposure to various novel materials related to the course provided by Professor; Professor's emphasis on conceptual clarity

o   Its an interesting course

o   Lectures were amazing.

o   The teacher and the staff are really responsive and dedicated to the course The enthusiasm of the instructor, the preparation and the method of teaching.

o   The professor, the teaching assistants, the materials used, the metaphors professor gave, the misc information (like links to talks, etc.) was excellent.

o   The flow of concepts

o   The explanations and analogies related to the topic in discussion Everything was great about this course.

o   Professor Rao is one of the best teachers I have come across in my life. A highly committed teacher relating most of the topics to real-life situations has made the subject super simple and interesting. His analogies of various topics with life have made me relate to the topics. Along with the subject, I have learned quite a few life lessons during the course.

o   Professor Rao's excellent delivery, contemporary applications of coursework, helpful TAs, stimulating lectures, insightful discussions on Piazza

o   Professor extremely dedicated and passionate about the subject.

o   I really liked the way professor connects various idea together and try to give deeper insights into concepts.

o   The teacher during office hours was like having a genius best friend to talk about the future of technology with while also getting homework help. The powerpoints were good and the lectures were engaging, tying in current events, pop culture references, and simple analogies that made conllex subject matter more palatable

o   I liked how the course gave an introduction to not just specific "forms" of AI (i.e., certain algorithms or ideas), but rather fundamental ideas in AI. It feels like after going through this course, I could pick up any AI textbook and at least have a rough idea of what's going on before diving into the details of it, which I think is precisely what an "introduction" class should be.

o   This class revealed a lot about what AI is, and was an interesting topic. The real concepts of AI

o   I liked the programming projects; although I thought they could have been made a bit more demanding (double the amount of code expected).

o   The instructors obvious passion for the topic and his sense of humor

o   His lectures, slides and student summaries.

o   Learning about different techniques in AI, the concepts underlying those techniques, how the field is constantly changing, and the professor's passion for teaching the course.

o   The sheer span of this course really took me by surprise, but a very pleasant one. This was the BEST learning experience I could have ever experienced in my whole life. The course structure was perfectly suited for learning not just the basics, but a significant amount of advanced AI, which in turn made it fun. But, the whole enjoyment was possible because of Prof. Rao. I will never forget when you said"I always talk about death so that you won't die out there". Thank you very much for making this a very difficult but a fun semester.

 

 

25

Comments

��


 

 

o   Intro to AI by Professor Rao is not just a course you take, it is an odyssey. With Rao as your guide, you will go through many ups and downs and if you spend time learning what he has to teach, you will be much better off for it. There is no other person I have seen with greater dedication and enthusiasm for teaching. You will learn much more than just AI in this course. You will learn many important life lessons along the way. Rao has a way of conveying concepts in a way that are sure to make a mark in your head. He has a knack for taking the most difficult concepts and making them seem trivial. That said, this course is certainly not for the faint of heart or slackers. If you take this course when it is being taught by Rao, be prepared to give it your all since you are sure to get a huge reward if you act optimally. I can say with the utmost confidence that I am a better person because I took this course.

o   Love ya Rao.

o   It is the best course at asu

o   Professor has deep knowledge and passion for the subject, and communicates complex ideas in a very interesting manner, Although he can be a little demeaning/egocentric sometimes.

o   Teacher with a great attitude to teach and help people learn

o   I would encourage everyone to take this course if they plan on specializing in AI/ML domains because the course is structured so well and the instructor teaches it so well that you grasp the concepts quickly. All in all I loved the course.

o   Don't ever let professor Rao leave ASU

o   Great course

o   Overall, despite some of my minor gripes, this class was my favorite class I have ever taken at ASU

o   One of the best. Kudos to the Professor and his brilliant team of TAs. This is the best course for introduction to AI on this planet right now.

o   I like the way he introduces any new topics and goes in depth of the topic ensuring the students understand the ideas he is throwing at them.He has phenomenal grip on the subject and always try to stay fresh with any topic he teaches in the class. I fell in love with the course and will never forget about this course and the professor. Lastly, the TA's are really helpful and are very friendly during any course related discussions. I recommend everyone to take this course certainly when Prof Rao teaches it. Trust me you will definitely enjoy, learn a lot and will surely not regret.

o   Course was hard but I learned a lot.

o   Amazing instructor, course worth taking if you're inclined towards machine learning and artificial intelligence.

o   Overall, it was a nice journey for me in the AI class. Overall good, very tough course

o   One of the intensive yet best course I have taken.

o   Great class, we should have more classes on AI (and topics covered in AI), such as NLP, etc. Super glad to take this course under the professor

o   Professor Rao is truly one of the best professors I've ever had the chance to study under. His lectures are insightful and his communication excellent. Would definitely recommend this course to anyone who wants to introduce himself/herself to the world of AI.

o   In general, a tough course but definitely worthwhile.

o   Greatly enjoyed the course and grateful that I enrolled in it during a semester where Rao was the professor for it.

o   Best professor in ASU

 

 

CSE471 [Fall 2017] Intro to AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.68 Course:4.51

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

o   I have never learned more about a single subject in any other course.

o   Its a fascinating topic with a teacher who has fascinating insights on said topic. His breadth of knowledge obviously extends the vast depth of this topic. His quote of a doctor knows a little bit of everything and everything about something seems to hold true for himself on this subject.

o   Professor; he is amazing. I got an over ride for this course and consider myself lucky to be taking this course. ASU needs more professors like him who are dedicated towards students. His assignments and homeworks and TAs are amazing; they are there to help at every step.

o   The professor really cared about all of us and wanted to share as much information as possible as he could with all of us before the course was over. He worked us hard and I had a lot of fun.

o   The extensive coverage of topics.
* (Super)^(number of stars in universe) enthusiastic professor. 
* Very relevant home-works. 
* Projects were extensive.
* Super duper responsive TAs on Piazza. 
* I liked the extra material/ reading posts on Piazza supporting what was taught in class. 
* So many references to the current trends in AI and keeping the class upto date with some of them. 
* Amazing examples and analogies for every obtuse topic in class. 
* Last 10 mins of the class. - The good bye.

o   Everything was just wonderful. I loved the philosophical discussions the most, I think; it's nice when everything isn't just theory and code. I also appreciated the references he gave us to learn more about topics that we couldn't go over in depth.

o   Professor Rao's teaching style encourages the students to think out of the box. He gives examples that stick to the brain making understanding the course material easy.

o   It's very interesting. The professor is good at teaching. It had fun and interesting projects. Does a great job at keeping it all relevant and giving example about what is happening now.

o   Instructor is proficient in the material taught and has breadth of knowledge over the subject.

o   Enthusiasm for the subject, great introduction to many of the topics in the AI Space. Professor was always very insightful into the current state of AI and how it is evolving in the world around us.

o   The ideas about AI that were discussed and especially, how they were delivered by Prof Rao was brilliant.

o   The projects were really fun.

o   The material itself was very interesting and I learned a lot of cool concepts

o   Every concept is explained in detail, the idea of having recorded lectures and the pre class activities made us to be right on track

o   Interesting material, interesting professor, Dr. Rao showed a lot of enthusiasm for the course, kind of made everyone live and breathe AI

o   Instructor enthusiasm for teaching this course. He is really good.

o   Engaging in more philosophical thinking about AI.

o   Very diverse topics, entertaining course

o   The pacman project was v good. It is good that Prof Kambhampati is committed to using modern teaching tools (eg pacman project, socrative, piazza etc).

o   Project

o   The course content and the professor is awesome!

o   Professor Rao's teaching.

o   His interest to teach and make students learn

o   This course (Artificial Intelligence) is extremely relevant to my interests. It taught me a lot of very critical ideas in AI and introduced me to Tensorflow (a very popular machine learning library for Python).

o   Great content and great quality of delivery of lectures

o   I loved the relevance of the material being covered and the way in which it was communicated to students. Also, the PacMan projects are the most fun and well-executed projects I have done in a CS course at ASU.

o   The enthusiam of the instructor. The instructor put in a lot of effort to generate interest of the students. The projects were engaging.

o   Learning about the different application of AI.

o   The application of concepts to real world scenarios.

o   great professor and teaching staff

o   I went into this class with an interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence and Rao covered a large amount of material in a short amount of time and did it with clarity and humor. I loved going to class. This class has really made me want to do more research and learning in the artificial intelligence problem space.

o   Projects

o   Prof. Rao was excellent and did put a lot of effort to make this course worth everything.

o   The way he explains and connects topics ... Best for an intro class

o   I loved how enthusiastic the lectures were, as well as their availability online.

o   Professor Rao's approach to life in general is really insightful. He is the best faculty in entire ASU or at least in all of the courses I have taken till now. But i think you would be knowing this. He taught us everything in AI. An analogous comparison could be made with English, starting from alphabets to writing long essays in same 3-months course, that's the volume we have covered. But most importantly, the way professor gave importance to learning rather than examscores is so rare in this world.

25

Comments

o   This class was one of the most challenging I've ever taken, and one of the most rewarding.

o   Wow! This was an amazing class, and I am so happy to have taken it. I have a newfound respect for and admiration of AI, so much so that I might even consider it in the future. Dr. Kambhampati is a gem of an instructor, and I wish every professor was as passionate and as prepared as he was for this class.

o   The whole course is like a dream- a good one. Its everything you could have asked for and then at the end of it you want it to go on for a bit more. The professor goes beyond and takes extra hours just so that we can learn more. The enthusiasm of the professor is unmatched. All decisions are made with consensus of the class, which was also one of the good things in class - we have a say. Having the class on youtube was very helpful, i referred the lectures again and again to understand some concepts. Amazingly helpful TA's. Exams made you think. Overall very happy with the course and the amount of topics covered. Easily covered 3 -4 courses material in a single course. Make students industry ready to pick from here and apply the knowledge in real world.

o   An overall fantastic professor. Extremely knowledgeable, cared deeply about the students and their learning. A few examples ought to spell it out:

- Called in from Australia on the first or second day of classes to answer student questions despite it being 2 or 3 AM for him

- Posts frequently on Piazza asking for student feedback on his teaching, the topics, the assignments, and the exams

- Makes an effort to learn students by name

- Stayed an extra 30 minutes every single class for about half the semester in order to "make up" for classes he missed near the beginning

- Brought in treats for the entire class for Thanksgiving using his own money

o   Overall he is an awesome professor and I am gald that I took his course.

o   A lot of work, but definitely worth it (if I pass....). You should also give your TAs a raise, because they work really hard and also show a high level of enthusiasm for AI

o   Well, as I have already said, Professor Rao is one of the best faculty in ASU. It was an honor to take a class under him. In most of the areas except may be one or two areas like religion I feel my views echoes and is almost same. So it always feels better to be validated by president by AAAI. After this course, I am really interested in doing research under the guidance of Professor Rao. At least for me he is the best professor and teacher among all teachers , faculties who have taught me in class.

o   Overall good course

o   I have taken few courses where TAs are so so bad. But CSE 471 TAs are amazing

o   This is a good course and Prof Kambhampati is enthusiastic. Clear worked examples for each topic would really help the learning process.

o   I learnt a lot ... i wish I would have taken this in my first sem and contiued in this area

o   I am glad that I took the course. The entire course is fascinating.

o   I kind of feel like it might serve this class well to be split in half in a way but I wouldn't be able to tell how best to split the content for it. It just doesn't seem like there's enough time to go through the material for the course, but I do have to say Rao did a great service to being able to cover as much as he was able to. I just feel he might be better served with a bit more space and time to cover more content. Maybe you could do an odd A/B session that's longer than the standard lecture time and still fit that all in the equivalent of a semester who knows.

o   Would recommend this course to students who like the idea of Artificial Intelligence and are willing to put in time and effort

o   Very satisfied

o   Professor Rao was very approachable and responsive to student feedback.

o   Use blackboard more.

o   always recommended

o   I'll be graduating this semester, but I would have loved to take another class from Rao possibly a follow up to the Intro Class that expands even more into the machine learning field.

o   Good course. But sometimes I felt like it is designed to be unnecessarily time consuming.

o   If possible, in future can you try generating 3d video presentations for topics so that it will be another aid for your already well explained topics

o   Very good class. Professor is really enthusiastic in this course. Learned a lot of interesting stuff. But maybe teaching faster in the first half of the semester and slower the second half of the semester.

o   Rao is a master lecturer. I don't think you need me to tell you that. Pay him more or you deserve to lose him, you probably will. Our stupid football coach who barely wins half the time makes over 3 million dollars.

 

 

CSE471 [Fall 2016] Intro to AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.61 Course:4.30

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

 

 

o   The instructor is very entertaining and is my favorite lecturer this semester. The topics he discussed were both interesting and difficult, but he did well to use vary basic analogies and examples to take those intense ideas and dumb them down a little.

o   Interesting and challenging material, and Dr. Kambhampati was a great lecturer.

o   I loved learning how AI works.

o   Literally absolutely everything.

o   The topics discussed are very interesting and applicable to real world scenarios and definitely forced me to think about specific scenarios in a different way than I would have before taking this class.

o   Active class, energetic professor.

o   The material was very engaging and I actually (I'm sure that some students would disagree with me for whatever reason) liked the side-topics. Felt like I was actually being taught things organically and not just fed content according to some prescribed list of checkboxes on some curriculum document.

Actually, I'm happy that I even learned things at all! Unfortunately a rare feeling in my major.

Also the content was relevant and I've been applying concepts from class to my own projects, something I can't really say about any other classes I've taken.

o   I liked a lot about this class, however, one thing stood out above the rest...The Pacman Projects. These were by far the most interesting part of the class, my only regret is that we didn't get to do all of them.

The material itself was fascinating, I loved almost every topic that we covered.

The graduate TAs were very helpful and willing to go above and beyond to help.

The recorded lectures were also great, it was nice to be able to go back and view topics or re-watch things to get a better understanding.

o   The pacman projects were amazing. Also Rao's jokes.

o   The ability of the professors and TAs to encourage thought beyond the initial ideas presented.

o   The material was extremely interesting.

o   Neural nets are interesting and the professor is both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject, making his lectures engaging.

o   Programming assignments

o   Good and passionate teaching by the professor.

o   Each topic was taught with enough depth to allow someone to pick up and continue focus in that area or put it into practice

o   The topics covered

o   Course all by itself was awesome and with that professor's teaching and projects and homeworks boosted every good thing related to it.

o   Valuable concepts that can be applied to areas other than AI

o   The pacman projects.

o   Excellent teaching and course structure

o   Way of teaching, everything actually.

o   I liked the course material and most of the projects.

o   The enthusiasm given during lectures.

o   The material was very interesting. I loved the projects too. Professor was very enthusiastic and very nice. He is a very knowledgeable and fun guy.

 

 

25

Comments

 

 

o   The professor is very enthusiastic about the material, and is obviously very knowledgeable about AI. In other classes, when a student asks a question and the professor begins his response with "that's interesting", you know that the professor doesn't know the answer. In this class, if professor Kambhampati begins an answer like that you know that he's considering a *lot* of relevant information and how best to tell beginner students so that they can understand. 

I also like how the professor will call out students for not paying attention. 

Lastly, the professor has a great personality, is really funny, and includes a lot of references to movies, tv shows, current events, and other things that keep college students focused.

o   Good class!

o   Great class. So, so happy I took it. I'm already using some of the things I learned in a personal project.

o   Much of the material was a little over my head, or felt a bit complicated for an "intro to AI" class. On the other hand, it made it interesting. This class would not have been nearly as good if the professor dumbed it down.

o   Rao is, tied with Dr. Adam Doupe, the best CS professor I've had at ASU. Lectures were interesting and sprinkled with humor. 

There needs to be a recitation alongside this class. Also, all the homework should be graded. The last 2 weren't, hence I had less motivation to do them. I think if I did them it would have helped me learn the material better and perform better on the second midterm.

o   I greatly enjoyed the course, and wish more in the future in knowledge of artificial intelligence.

o   Too Long Didn't Read (TLDR): Instructor is amazing. Content is fun and interesting. Questionable workload and projects.

o   Very interesting course, maybe split it into 2 weekly sessions to help keep up with the material.

o   Must recommended under him if your area of Interest is AI

o   Videos like your Value/Policy Computation for finite horizon MDP were invaluable to learning the subject's computation. If you post videos like that for examples given in class, I believe this would be a tremendous help for future students.

o   Like this class a lot and thoroughly enjoyed each session

o   TA's were friendly enough answering all our questions

o   The Professor is extremely knowledgeable in the field and I honestly enjoyed every lecture. However, the exams and projects had a degree of difficulty beyond what one might expect for an "intro" class on a subject area. I can appreciate the great depth to which the subjects were explored but it did make understanding somewhat difficult. Also, as a note to ASU, having lectures that run for more than 2 hours should be prohibited. Despite how engaging and interesting the course was I couldn't help but lose focus at times and even with the lectures recorded, digging through 3 hours of video to recover those moments was often more effort than it was worth.

o   One of the great courses offered at ASU, very interesting material. Would like to take more AI classes

o   Professor was always ready and prepared. He put all his effort into this class but I think he can explain the complicated materials using simpler examples.

o   Awesome course

 

 

 

CSE471/598 [Fall 2015] Intro to AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.47 (4.35UG 4.67G) Course:4.12(4.02UG, 4.42G)

(Green comments by UG students and Orange ones by Grad students)

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

o   This was by far the best class I have ever taken at ASU. Not only was the topic interesting, but Professor Rao taught the class in an extremely interesting and engaging manner. For a class that could have easily been another monotonous CS class where you learn interesting content in a dreary and uninteresting way from Wikipedia pages and YouTube videos from other universities, this was taught in a masterful way, which was unlike any other ASU class I've taken in which more of a stress was placed on being interested in the content, which led to understanding the content, then understanding the content for a grade.

o   I loved the depth and interest the professor had regarding the course material.

o   Everything! By far the best class I have ever taken here at ASU.

o   Teacher's knowledge and passion for the subject.

o   I thought the material taught and the projects given we very enjoyable and challenging. I think professor Kambhampati is one of the best lecturers I have had in my college experience and would very much enjoy taking another class with him.

o   The atmosphere, it was very welcoming and relaxed which resulted in hyper attention followed by drowsiness.

o   The professor was extremely knowledgeable in the field and the best lecturer I ever had.

o   Ideas & Algorithms. I also learned more from the take home exam than I did studying. It's one thing to try to learn from taking the course, but actively looking for knowledge is how I take in information (see general comments regarding problems/questions).

o   Very cool topics with extremely wide ranges of applicability. Could have gone into more practical examples of this applicability though just for a tiny bit of context

o   Programming projects

o   Projects were very fun and interesting, promoted learning the content

o   Seeing the Pacman projects run, it was actually nice to see AI running in practice rather than looking at algorithms 24/7

o   Learning about heuristics as well as doing the pacman projects.

o   Cover many topics in the subject.

o   taped lecture, if I needed more understanding on subjects, I could rewatch lectures and solidify understanding. 
the projects being so "finished"

o   Professor was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject. Material presented was drawn from other more prestigious/rigorous courses at other universities. In person lectures were usually engaging. Text book was well selected and a valuable resource. Projects were really interesting and well crafted. Very accommodating with due dates.

o   Dr. Kambhampati's lectures are highly engaging and informative. His anecdotes and sense of humor are especially memorable. The Piazza discussion board also had some interesting discussions.

 

o   The instructor had in genius ways for explaining each topic and relating it to real life scenarios to clarify one's understanding. He always showed us the big picture in class and went over the details to a substantial depth. He let us figure out the homework problems by ourselves. This helped in gaining conceptual depth in the topics.

 

o   Professor's teaching style.

o   Course Material
2) Instructor Enthusiasm and Knowledge of the course
3) Instructor's ability to create interest in the course
4) Instructor's Presentation
5) Resources to study
Excellent course. One of the best courses I have taken.

o   The professor made classes and topics really interesting. Classes that he teaches stimulate student's thinking

o   Professor is brilliant. Loved the class overall, loved everything that were given in the class.

o   Instructor is one the best I have seen at ASU
Great method of teaching

o   Professor Rao's enthusiasm for the subject is by far the best part about taking this class.

25

Comments

o   Best professor here at ASU hands down.

o   One of the best and most memorable classes I've ever taken. Rao is next level as an instructor and his breadth of life experience made his lectures and stories a blast.

o   Great teacher, would take another class with him.

o   awesome teacher, great class

o   Great professor, great book, great projects. Should be a sequence course so that more depth could be explored. This subject is more important than some required courses in the CS program. One of the only times in my experience a professor has made a concerted effort to connect with students outside of class.

o   Not that this is written before I know my final grade and thus this could all change, but I don't think so. Excellent course. I recommend Professor Rao to all students who want to not only learn, but be inspired.

o   Kambhampati is an amazing professor.

o   Honestly I am slightly torn, the once a week class allowed for more depth as the professor could expect students to watch the lecture, so effectively we had much more time available to understand concepts. However this also led to a lot of time being devoted to this course, and it almost feeling like 4,5 or even 6 credit hours instead of just 3.

o   The classes were very good, however the subject was too hard for me and I couldn't follow up with the class

 

o   I really loved the way the subject was taught in class. Although the work pressure was substantial, it helped us to learn a lot and have a wide perspective on the topic. It also inspired to think innovatively on the topics.

o   good

o   I wish I would have taken IR under him. On of the very few faculties in ASU under which you will learn something.

o   May be if some sample solved problems related to concepts are given as handouts will help students to understand concepts clearly.

o   Excellent course!

o   Definitely, Teacher of the year (I have heard he teach the same way every year, implies that I would nominate him every year :) )

o   Overall this was a very good course. Professor Rao's enthusiasm for the subject is unmatched by most professors I have had in the past. He does a great job reinforcing high level details of the topics and how those topics apply to the real world. I think this course could be improved if more resources were invested into recitation/problem solving sessions. Since Professor spends so much time covering the high level details (as he should), we need more help with implementing the actual problems. Of course these are just my opinions. Most recitation sessions weren't full so perhaps many students don't feel the same way I do. This would be a perfect course if there was a stronger emphasis on actual problem solving in recitation/lab environments mixed with the already awesome lectures Professor Rao gives.

 

o   The instructor had ingenius ways for explaining each topic and relating it to real life scenarios to clarify one's understanding. He always showed us the big picture in class and went over the details to a substantial depth. He let us figure out the homework problems by ourselves. This helped in gaining conceptual depth in the topics.

 

 

CSE494/598 [Spring 2015] Information Retrieval/Mining/Integration

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.77 (4.79UG, 4.76G) Course:4.54 (4.40UG, 4.59G)

(Green comments by UG students and Orange ones by Grad students)

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

o   The teacher

o   I liked the content and instruction.

o   I sometimes felt inadequate while trying to comprehend the math behind the concepts, but your explanations and examples made the learning much easier. I really feel like I learned more in this course than I do in two "normal" courses. Thank you!

o   The professor was hilarious, and he also knew how to encourage class participation while thoroughly educating us on each subject.

o   Professor is obviously very knowledgable about the subject and really interesting to listen to. The course absolutely stalemates student thinking and was a good introduction to search engines and big data in general.

o   Teaching Quality

o   Project and teaching

o   Learnt a lot from the course. Enjoyed enthusiastically learning about the course topics covered.

o   Instructor has immense knowledge about the subject. The hybrid way of watching lectures before the class and quiz in the class was very helpful to understand the concepts which required deep learning considering the topics of concern. The course itself was very interesting.

o   The knowledge of the professor on this topic. He has a very deep knowledge on this course, which made this course really interesting.

o   The way the instructor connect material to real life subjects.

o   In depth review of concepts

o   Course structure is good. Professor has very deep knowledge about the subject.

o   Professor! He is the "best" professor at ASU. He is very dedicated towards students. I remember, he took review session on Google hangout at midnight day before exam as he was out for conference. Lectures are never boring because of his sense of humor and of course how interestingly he teaches course content. Lot of real life stories related to contents he is teaching, makes him unique.

o   Do the project myself.

o   Professors knowledge about the subject and his way of teaching.

o   Professors teaching style and his enthusiasm

o   The Projects are the BEST part about this course. It has given me immense knowledge and programming skills required in the Industry. I feel I have achieved something after successfully completing this course.

o   Everything

o   Project

 

o   Professor's way of teaching made us think deeper about the topic. Course syllabus is a good collection of foundation topics in multiple areas

o   Excellent Teaching

o   The Content of the course is very interesting and the instructor who takes this course is one of the reason for enrolling in the course. Dr. Rao is the one of the gem of this university and the way he deliver knowledge is brilliant.

 

25

Comments

o   Though i may not have scored excellent grades in this course, but i end up on having a lot of basic knowledge in this area. Which was the highlight of the course for me.

o   I would like to pass a Thank You note to the CIDSE department and the professor for having this course.

o   I wish at least some of the important material were taught inside the class too.

o   One of the best courses of ASU.

o   I do not understand why students should take his class with the same topic : watching previous video in home and discussing in the class. In the other words, students should spend a lot of time preparing the class.

o   Great course, great teacher

o   Great Professor. Awesome course.

 

 

CSE494/598 [Spring 2014] Information Retrieval/Mining/Integration

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.82 (4.36UG, 4.86G) Course:4.66 (4.29UG, 4.66G)

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

o   Everything! Dr.Rao is probably one of the best things that can happen to you at ASU!

o   The quizzes we had every week in class ensured I watch the lecture videos regularly. The method of instruction of the professor is very clear, stimulates thinking. The lectures are packed with information and the course structure is great. The project are great too, they significantly deepened my understanding of key concepts.

o   The way the course is related to real world.
The projects that exposed the student to real world problems.
Thought provoking exams.

o   Simply awesome course. One of the best courses I had ever taken.

o   I got to learn a lot of things. I learnt many concepts of wide field in one course. Awesome knowledge of professor. Very energetic and inspiring.

o   (almost everything) The projects and the quizzes , discussions.

o   Professors enthusiasm and the his knowledge about the subject :)

o   Teaching and Projects

o   The concepts covered by the course are intriguing and every computer science student must take a similar course to understand something beyond data structures

o   The professors way of teaching.The real world example stated in class.

o   Although categorized as an undergrad course. It has the material required for a Phd course. Nice coursework and Instructor's done an amazing job.

o   This course gave me a chance to learn more than anything I have learnt so far. The course projects helped us to apply our theoretical knowledge on the subject.

o   The Professor was inspiring. You can't fluke the course. You will have put a lot of time and energy to do well in the course.

o   The wide range of topics covered in the class and the projects.

o   This course is MUST TAKE course. Professor is immensely knowledgeable and humorous at same time. Every time I watch his lectures , I feel like I should also pursue PhD.

o   I liked the projects and the way the professor teaches.

o   variety of topics, most of which are currently applied in computer science.

o   A Fantastic Course and according to me "The" best course at ASU and its all because of Professor Rao. His dedication in teaching this subject is tremendous which urges the Students to study more. The Quiz idea in every lecture is very good which builds a good discussion point and helps us Learn beyond the course and give even more.

o   Perhaps the best course at ASU. Pof. Rao is one of the very few professors who make learning fun. The depth with which professor covered the syllabus was remarkable. Prof Rap makes you to think about IR even when you are watching movies. A must do course.

o   Everything.

o   Projects, Professor and course material.

o   Course is very intuitive and stimulating.
2. Professor is very jovial and class was very interactive.
3. Good projects to support the course content.

o   The format of the class - it was flipped class and the in class quiz. It worked really well.

o   Everything!!! He is a great Professor!!!

o   The course content is very logical. The learning curve is amazingly good.
The instructor's inverted class concept of teaching is unique and helpful.
The projects really relate to the course content learned.
So, helps realize practical application and problems in applying the concept, which I feel is very important.

o   Almost everything. Surely the best course I took in my graduation. The way he teaches is just amazing, and the examples that he gives are just terrific.

o   The content of the course is very good and covers a lot of current topics with adequate amount of details.

o   Professor makes the class so lively with lot of practical examples and deep explanation for everything he says. Everything is so perfect, complete satisfaction about the course and joy of learning so much. Learning curve for anyone would be simply great.

o   Range of extremely interesting topics, relevant to industry.

o   everything

o   Develop Search Engine, Professor examples, illustrations, teaching methodologies.

o   The best course work, project work is extraordinary and the stuff taught by the professor is so much of importance.
Really makes us think about the concepts.

o   The classes taken are simulating and interesting.

o   The way professor explains the concepts is awesome.

o   The format of in class quizzes help solidify concepts.

o   How well the course is evaluated in itself by professor and how he encourages to do the right thing rather looking at it with the google perspective.

o   The structure of the course. Unlike most other classes that focus on spurts of memorization and testing, which leads to a high rate of forgetfulness, this class actually encouraged learning. I loved the idea of taking online lectures and then devoting the actual lecture time to an academic discussion. This way, what we learned throughout the week was solidified and any misconceptions corrected.

 

25

Comments

o   Holy place for Hindus - Kashi
Holy place for Muslims - Mecca
Holy place for Jews - Israel
Holy place for ASU CS student - CSE494 class.
Life changing professor and life changing course!
Kudos and salute to Dr.Rao!
Excellent would be an understatement for this class!
Strongly recommend this course for anyone who is interested in this area.

o   I'm very glad that I took this course. It has surely given me a great insight into core concepts of information retrieval. I would love to take other courses under this professor if they are offered sometime in the subsequent semesters.

o   Overall, I am satisfied that I have learned something new in the class.
The projects really got my thinking.
Even topics like bidding are discussed in the class that was one awesome lecture.

o   Please do take this course, before you graduate.

o   The best course ever at ASU

o   I consider myself lucky that I got a chance to take a course under Professor Kambhampati.

o   Excellent Class :)

o   I learned a lot in this course. Loved the subject

o   Excellent Course. Excellent Professor.

o   Professor Rao's awesome!!!!!

o   My coding skills increased tremendously after taking this course. Though the projects require additional effort, its worth doing them. Definitely the best course I have taken so far.

o   Excellent course. Professor is very enthusiastic and passionate to teach. He keeps your interest maintained in the subject.

o   It would be better if the instructor starts a graduate course in this area.

o   Good professor, good course to be on the resume.

o   A Fantastic Course and I would recommend every CS Student to take it Once to experience Prof Rao's Teaching at his Best.

o   He inspire me.

-       A must take course. One can learn a lot.
- Please change TA.

o   Must take course if you are interested in data science.
2. Heavy course but worth the effort.

o   Prof is awesome. He is enthusiastic and always well prepared. He gave real life examples for almost all the concepts he taught. He is best Prof I have studied under.

o   It would be great if the prof has separate deadlines for project code(something like 2 days before the analysis has to be submitted) and analysis of the project. This will be great for all because all the students worry about code and hence end up screwing their analysis. Hence its just a suggestion for the prof when he offers this course next time.

o   Instructor is an exceptional person.

o   Professor is super cool awesome ! Lots of insights, loads of knowledge transferred to everyone. Best of all courses I have taken so far ! Feeling great and so thankful for being in his class ! He made us think. He made us to approach problem in different dimensions. Hats off to Professor !!

o   Excellent course and instructor! Dr. Rao's lectures are the best I have ever experienced. The course has extremely interesting topics and the way Dr. Rao explains it is simply brilliant! To build a mini search engine as a project is pretty exciting and is great learning.

o   Even though the load is high, we can learn a lot of things.

o   A very interesting course which every computer science student must take.

o   Awesome instructor, great lecturer

o   I believe the content that was presented was very enjoyable, and valuable to students of my major. I feel, that more courses on related topics would be highly beneficial, and I am amazed at how few students in my undergraduate class even considered taking this course, as its content should be deemed essential

 

 

 

 

 

CSE 571 [Fall 2013] Artificial Intelligence (grad level)

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse571]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.20 Course:4.24

 

o   Tremendously intellectually stimulating.

o   The opportunity to relate the material to current activities in the AI community. Reading papers that are current and learning concepts that are recent and active.

o   Projects, content.

o   Teacher's knowledge. He has a lot of knowledge on the subject.

o   Instructor covered advanced material that is not usually covered in Artificial Intelligence classes.

o   designing of course work.. professor and the way of teaching and support materials provided by professor.

o   The classes are very interesting. A wide range of topics in AI are covered. The homework problems are adequate to help understand the topics in the class.

o   The subject and (most of the time) the way it was presented. The course was challenging but extremely interesting and while the instructor is somewhat intimidating, I really enjoyed his explanations.

o   Lecture Videos

o   The topics that were discussed

o   LDA

o   Amazing enthusiasm by the professor. the professor has a very deep understanding of the topics. Amazing in comparing and contrasting topics in the subject. The video lectures were a blessing as I could rewatch the videos again and again. I can go ga-ga about the course. But in gist, the learnings are definately worth the money and time put in. The projects are really exciting too.

o   The professor did a very good job of making the course interesting and engaging. I learned a great deal this semester about the subject.

o   I think this is a really great course that introduces a lot of interesting ideas. I really liked the coding portions of the assignments. 
The instructor really has a passion for the topics that come across in his teaching. He does his best to make even the most difficult topics understandable.

o   How the course takes you through the ideas that were involved in past in AI field to the current state of the art.

o   The concepts presented in this class are complex and difficult to understand. There were many instances when references to ancillary topics were mentioned or concepts that were coming but not yet developed were brought up. This added to the difficulty of understanding the material since I was not familiar with many of the concepts ancillary concepts mentioned. It would be helpful to stay focused on the development of the concepts without jumping ahead for previews from time-to-time.

o   this is a excellent course and should be there every semester in the curriculum..

o   amazing course. overall very happy with my performance and overall teaching of the professor.

o   Clearer expectations on homework assignments would be appreciated, as well as a more even distribution of work across the semester. I really enjoyed the professor's teaching style, though.

o   Overall, I really enjoy this course.

o   Professor Subbrao is an excellent teacher --- easily the best among all the graduate courses I have taken. His ability to correlate concepts across a wide range of topics --- deterministic planning, markov decision processes, reinforcement learning and Bayesian inferencing --- is simply unmatched. The video recordings of lectures are very useful. I would strongly recommend this course to people interested in AI.

 

 

CSE 494/598 [Spring 2013] Information Retrieval/Mining/Integration

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: (4.72 UG, 4.53G) Course: (4.07 UG; 4.43G)

 

 

o   This is by far the most interesting course I've ever taken at ASU and I wish more classes were like this one. I actually feel as though I've learned something useful, which I can't say about some of my other classes sadly...

o   By far the most interesting class i took this semester.

o   Great teacher and course

o   professor's teaching, projects for the course are very good and relevant

o   His teaching methodologies and the use of various platforms for interacting among fellow students and the professor

o   Special content.

o   The teaching is very good. Professor delivers his ideas to students very well.

o   It covers a wide range of topics. Information retrieval is especially interesting and useful for me.

o   Projects and home works helped me in understanding the concepts well

o   The project in this course is very good.

o   Can relate topics and algorithms to that used in the industry

o   Instructor's enthusiasm and mastery over the topics

o   Project and the lectures. Especially the flipped classroom was great. Professors way of explaining things are great

o   Great course

o   Good Syllabus

o   The topics covered are interesting and advanced and, the project looks good on the resume

o   Covers many topics

o   Project.

o   Everything

o   Rich concepts and hard to get such course which gives you an insight about many crucial topics under one course.

o   Extremely good professor. I love his way of teaching. I would love to take more courses under him. Thank You professor!!!

o   Best course I took at ASU. I would be happy its offered every semester so everybody get a chance to take this.

o   Considering the topics covered and the project, I believe this should be a graduate course rather than a 598 course

o   -Nice course. Professor is good.
-Projects are the best thing i liked. Even home works are good. Except HW3.

o   Lectures should be taken in class and not online.

o   Good

o   Professor is very well prepared about the course content.He comes up with real world examples to explain the concept thoroughly.He is very energetic and always utilized the whole class time for teaching and he is always updated with the latest things going on in the industry.

o   -The concepts are very well thought by professor.
-Good home work and projects that simulates us to think practically the concepts that are been thought
- Professor is excellent in his knowledge.
-I would like to take any course thought by him

 

 

CSE 571 [Fall 2012] Artificial Intelligence (grad level)

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse571]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.45 Course:3.91

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

The professor was engaged, interesting, knew the material, and clearly put a lot of effort into it. It was great!

 

Dr. Kambhampati is an enjoyable lecturer. He is knowledgable about the topic, but doesn't "speak above" his class.

 

Rao is a great lecturer. He definitely has a passion for AI and that is conveyed in every lecture he gives. He also has a keen ability to perceive his students in multiple ways: he always has a very good feel for how much of his lecture is being understood and he quickly understands just what a student is asking and is able to give good answers, even if he over-fits the question a little sometimes. :)

 

Professor is very enthusiastic about topic. Explained complicated ideas well. Very willing to discuss ideas with students.

The programming assignments.

 

Concepts and their real-time implementations. And the way of teaching by the professor

 

The best thing about this course was the instructor's enthusiasm for the subject. It was extremely easy for me to simply sit down and pay 100% attention throughout the lecture.


Additionally, the professor very often repeated ideas 3-4 times when he thought they were important. This was actually a very refreshing approach, as most other professors usually say something once and expect it to be committed to memory instantly and permanently.

Also, the professor had tons of tie-ins to real life intelligence. After all, we are trying to model real intelligence in AI, but it is easy to obsess over the little things and forget the big picture. Relating back to real life was great for this.

Rao is great at find a funny example to illustrate the idea. This is very helpful. And he can alway find the correlation between two different idea.

25

Comments

Great work!

 

Taking this course convinced me that an intro to AI course should be required as part of an undergraduate CS curriculum. Pretty soon in industry, the problems being worked on by programmers on a day-to-day basis will reach the complexity that only AI algorithms even dare to touch. Without some background in AI, I think future students will be lost on how to solve such problems.

 

Love your enthusiasm in this domain.

 

 

CSE 471/598 [Spring 2012] Introduction to AI

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.71 (4.52 UG, 4.87 G) Course: 4.47 (4.13 UG; 4.75G)

 

25

Comments

 

This is one of the best classes I've had during my undergrad period. It's extremely difficult, but rewarding at the end.

 

My e-mail inbox was always filled with emails from the professor, such a huge efforts taken by him for the course.


This course should made for 4-5 credits though.

 

One of the best course in ASU and one of the best profs in CIDSE.

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

The mathematical base of the course. Professor was always well prepared, tried to make us understand the concepts with various techniques.


Considerations from the professor about extending deadlines.
Consideration to have test #2 take home.


Available videos online.

 

Mostly liked the way the instructor presented the ideas. The class was engaging and interesting. I hope to use some of the concepts learned in the class into my work in future.

 

The search algorithm techniques.


Video lectures made available to students always.

 

Professor's teaching and the way in which he elucidated the ideas

 

The way the Professor teaches even the most toughest of concepts makes it extremely easy to understand.

 

the ideas taught

 

The projects

 

The assignments were really good.

 

Very interesting topic. Teacher gives good analogies and explanations to help students understand most concepts.

 

Very interesting topic

 

The professor's way of teaching the subject, his fairness in exams and projects, his availability to answer questions, the range of content that was taught and the practical usage of it.

 

The course material supplemented the homework and projects very well.

 

The course covered many interesting topics and Dr.Rao was very enthusiastic.

 

The projects

 

 

CSE 494/598 [Fall 2011] Information Retrieval/Mining/Integration

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.83 (4.54 UG, 4.89G) Course: 4.7 (4.28 UG; 4.78G)

 

CSE 598 Kambhampati Instructor Evaluation Fall 2011

 

 

25

Comments

 

Amazing Course. Ridiculously amazing Professor :)

 

 

Overall this is the best class and all the credits should go to Prof. Rao.

 

Overall this was one of the best courses I have taken at ASU. The enthusiasm and clarity with which Dr. Rao teaches various concepts, keeps you engaged (and awake :) ) in the class. His examples and analogies help in understanding and remembering the concepts.


A big thanks to Dr. Rao ...

 

The professor is absolutely brilliant.I haven't come across a professor who is so knowledgeable and at the same time puts so much effort in making sure he imparts the knowledge to the students.

 

More courses of this sort for graduate students as they are limited to the number of cse598 they can take and have very few courses like this in their graduate courses.

 

Best course ever to take

 

Subbarao Kambhampati is really good professor and his teaching techniques are exceptional.

 

Reignited my interest in the topics.

 

This is the best course I have taken at ASU

 

This is probably my favorite class that I've taken in the CS school.

 

Great course material. I feel like I got a basic understanding of the topics covered that may drive future studies.

 

I have no words to praise this professor.

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

I liked a lot of things about this course. This course covered a lot of interesting topics. The projects were also very useful. They not only helped to learn the course topics well but also made us involve into a lot of algorithms and logic while trying to implement them. The professor was helpful when it came to sharing extra topics and lot of other extra sources for learning. Also the online lecture videos were made available for later reference was a huge help.

 

The instructor's method of teaching made the course very interesting. All the concepts taught were very relevant. The project was tailored to the teachings in the class.

 

Presentation of subject matters and projects

 

This course covered a broad range of topics. the projects helped us understand these concepts even better. Dr. Rao is an excellent instructor who keeps you engaged with good examples and analogies. (and a lot of humor :) )

 

The course is very interesting and informative.It really helped understand all the current technologies.

 

Almost everything .... This course is worth taking ...

 

Whole course.

 

Everything

 

The TA was really helpful.
Class was sometimes interesting, but there are times that it gets very in-depth and complicated and that's when I get lost.
Audio & Video available online.
Cheat sheet for exam.
Take home final.

 

The information was very relevant. It covered a wide array of topics all of which very useful and applicable

 

The course was very well handled and one of the few best courses there is available in ASU.

 

Liked the manner in which the classes, assignments and projects were synchronized. The course itself is very interesting and the professor's impartation is excellent.

 

Everything

 

understanding of search engine and realization that there is still lot of work in doing a better search engine, and professor who made this realization possible.

 

The course is well organized and the implementation of the projects makes understanding more clear and appreciate the course.
The assignments are also very good and help to get clear picture of the course.

 

 

 

The instructor is the best at ASU.

 

This course introduced me to a lot of aspects of computer science which i was unaware of. The instructor's efforts motivates the students to do more in this course.

 

Entire course structure. Project designing.

 

Course inherently is exciting and interests me, added the professor is too good and gives various ideas and thoughts to ponder upon

 

The subject material was new and interesting, and professor Kambhampati made it very accessible. I liked that we covered concepts and techniques that we could actually go home and implement, and that the projects involved us building something that I would not have expected myself to be able to make.

 

Applying Clustering for grade fairness helps ease the tension of getting very low point-grades on tests.

 

Great material. Project was fairly beneficial in gaining understanding of how to implement some of the topics learned in class

 

The topic and the professor

 

 

 

 

CSE 494/598 [Spring 2010] Information Retrieval/Mining/Integration

[Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.78 (4.87 UG, 4.75G) Course: 4.59 (4.63 UG; 4.57G)

 

CSE 494 Kambhampati Instructor Evaluation Spring 2010

Subbarao Kambhampati

23 What did you like most about this course?

Fun and interesting topics. My brain is now crammed full of new knowledge. The programming assignments were fun albeit very long.

 

Rao actually cares. Unlike most of the professors in the CS school, he actually learns who his students are, and actually enjoys the topic he's teaching.

He actively fought to get the class dual-listed as a grad and undergrad class. He's probably my favorite professor that I've had while attending ASU.

 

The way the ideas were introduced and how emphasis was given to develop the "right" inuition.

 

Professor is amazing!

 

It did a good job of covering important areas in IR, Data Mining, and information extraction. Many interesting and novel ideas were presented.

The professor is obviously very intelligent and interested/expert in many diverse areas. That breadth of knowledge was fun to see.

everything..

 

The content, way of presentation, project, open environment.

 

The teacher was very excited, and I learned many new things. Also, putting videos on the website was excellent.

 

inspires thinking, and broadens vision.

 

25 Comments

This is a fantastic course on interesting topics taught by somebody who actually cares.

More classes should be like this. More professors should be like this!

 

The instructor is top-class. The course has increased my breadth-wise knowledge of computer science. It has done a lot of good to my self-confidence.

Thanks Rao for offering this awesome course. Keep up the good work.

 

The information in this class is invaluable and I'm glad to know it. Making data mining a pre-req for this course would save time

and allow the professor to get to everything without having to extend all of his classes.

 

nice course.. exceptional instructor whose teaching skills make difficult topics easy to understand..


suggestion - asu or atleast cs dept should record such courses (courses taken by prof rao) and make them freely available.. similar to mit ocw..

 

Best professor.

 

excellent course overall

 

 

CSE 571 [Fall 2009] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse571]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.54 Course: 3.64

 

 

CSE 571 Instructor Evaluation Fall 2009

Subbarao Kambhampati

SLN: 86301

23 What did you like most about this course?

Learn the approaches for intelligent solutions for well known problems

 

The best thing about this course was the wide array of topics that were covered in more than reasonable depth - the instructor put in a lot of effort into preparing for each class and I think the students benefitted from this.

 

Prof. Rao was good at asking the students' opinions about the course. I like that he brought in relevant, state-of-the-art material for us to read.

 

I like the fact that Professor Rao introduced a wide array of AI related topics. I like the collaborative framework established for student cross-pollination.

 

The professor thoroughly inspired as students to think. The material was broad, but insightful. The lecture style coupled with the project was ideal.

 

The papers and extra study material provide by the professor where highly informative and excellent. Prof's way of relating the theory of subjects to real world examples and their practical application made the whole subject fun and comprehensible.

 

I like the fact that the professor does not make it a completely mathematical course, and that he tries to tell the actual logic behind the problem. I appreciate the fact that this course does not have homeworks, thus allowing us to listen for understanding only, not for picking up tips for homeworks.


The paper reading was quite useful. The blog, not so much.

 

Artificial Intelligence has always been an area of interest to me.

 

I find the topic interesting and worth learning. The instructor is always well prepared and makes excellent points.

The lectures should be youtubed cause I rarely catch everything he is trying to say on the first pass.

I liked the self directed project but in any cases where projects are directed by students there is going to be a

high variance in the amount of effort people spend. In a class as general as "advanced AI" this may be inevitable.

25 Comments

Even though I prefer applications and projects over lectures, this class managed to make lectures enjoyable sans projects.

 

I liked this course very much!

 

 

CSE 471/598 [Spring 2009] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.52 (4.4 UG, 4.74G) Course: 4.37 (4.3 UG; 4.5G)

 

 

 

CSE 471 Instructor Evaluation Spring 2009

Subbarao Kambhampati

SLN: 15499

23  What did you like most about this course?

 

 

The instructor all the way. His style of teaching, making connections across course topics to create a big picture, his examples and last but not the least his wit. It was a fun ride through the semester and he really covered the breadth of the vast field of AI

 

This is one of the most exciting courses in the department! Unlike other courses that form the basis of a field of study, this course is (sort of) at the top of the food chain, so the concepts that we learnt in various other fields are applied here to solve practical problems and create systems that are truly useful.

 

The course material covered by Prof Rao and the examples and analogies that he uses to teach. Project and homeworks of Prof Rao are really challenging.

 

A very good introduction course, which covers a broad spectrum of sub-topics with adequate depth in each topic. Always a fun course, when it is taken by Rao.

 

Almost everything.


Dr. Kambhampati is an excellent instructor. He knows the material; he expresses the ideas well; and his enthusiasm for the topic is contagious.

 

The instructor was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic.


Dr Rao's treatment of the subject matter was exceptional, where many professors might have over indulged in mathematics to explain the inner workings of the systems, he explained everything logically and rationally. This helped all of us clearly understand the inner working of the subject and gain an appreciation for it.

 

Excellent projects. They're difficult, but not too difficult. It's nice that he gives us a "framework" of lisp code, and then we finish it up. Also, I liked the use of the blog and the thinking cap questions. It's really nice to struggle with a hard problem and know that if you don't get it, but just post what you're thinking, you won't get a bad grade. It allows you to "think out load" sort of.

 

It had a lot of interesting topics and it mad us correlate what we learn with our everyday life way of thinking. The curving based on all students.

 

Very interesting topics.

 

Programs were difficult but fun.

 

Projects were hard but good.

 

Loved the professor as a lecturer.

 

Great professor, explained everything, learned tons of stuff.

 

25  Comments

 

Excellent course. Professor's reputation is well earned. It's always awe inspiring to learn from someone who's flat out brilliant. Sometimes it's hard to keep up, but I really like being challenged.

I can't say it enough. This is an excellent course, and all CS students should take it. They'll come out of this class much more well rounded.

The instructor is full of enthusiasm in teaching the topics and with his humorous examples and analogies, makes boring topics too interesting. The course keeps you on your toes for the entire semester and sometimes you just wonder whether this is the only course you have taken in the entire semester. The assignments and projects of Prof Rao are really challenging. Tough to survive through Prof Rao's class.

 

Great course. Must take when Dr. Rao is teaching it.

 

Overall, an excellent course.

 

Rao is a pretty good teacher.

 

This subject was very easily able to excite my interest. It gave a channel in which all the concepts we have learnt earlier come to fruition in creating something truly useful. The projects and homeworks were challenging, and successfully completing them gave us a feeling of triumph.

I enjoyed this thoroughly.

 

Over all i liked the class, but wish that I had more time to just learn the material than sitting there doing homework and projects

 

 

 

 

CSE 494/598 [Fall 2008] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.52 (4.28 UG; 4.56 G) Course: 4.27 (4.04UG;4.31G)

 

CSE 494 Kambhampati Instructor Evaluation Fall 2008

Subbarao Kambhampati

23  What did you like most about this course?

Dr. Rao expresses his ideas clearly and make the course more interesting by giving good analogies.

 

I liked a lot that the instructor tried to give the students a look over the rim. It was not only about the techniques, but also about the way how we accept search engines like Google that might be good, but still not perfect (and we consider them as perfect).
Furthermore, the course gave me a good insight into information retrieval and how mathematics can be applied in such an environment.

 

Getting to learn from Rao is in itself a very nice experience.

 

Very interesting material, professor is passionate about the course and communicates information with enthusiasm...and his own biases and interpretations of reality as the truth as well. Nevertheless, he's fairly entertaining.

 

 

 

Extremely challenging!

 

the content was high quality

 

 

I have a learnt lot of new concepts in this course.

 

The projects were, undoubtedly, the best part. They helped me to deepen my understanding of the topics.

 

The breadth of the course. The detail of the background for seemingly simple approaches is
amazing.

 

I enjoyed learning about concepts that I can put to use in personal projects in the future.

 

The course is very much linked to the new technological advancements in the field of computer science

 

I liked the topics on Latent Semantic Indexing and Classification related topics. The Search Engine project really helped understand the concepts taught in class better. This course provides a very good base for IR and data mining.

 

 

Interesting subject matter.

 

This is a very interesting course which gives awesome background to everyday tools that we take for granted (i.e. Search Engines).

25  Comments

Excellent course

 

Excellent course!

 

Rao is a excellent teacher, communicate the ideas thoroughly. He is the most well prepared teacher I have ever come across

Be prepared to pull many all-nighters!!!!!!

 

People say that the professor gives more work to do, tough course etc., In the beginning even I felt the same but after a month I felt the course is simple because the first month I was recollecting linear algebra, which is a pre-requisite.

Assignments: All the assignments are straight forward. Dr. Rao gives an example in the class and you would have to solve a similar thing in the assignment. You can always go to audio and slides to know what he said in class If you feel you don't remember.
Project: The course becomes really simple if you know Java. My advice for students who will be takeing this course in coming years would be "learn Java" before taking the course. You don't need to spend more than 3 days for the entire(includes all the phases) project.

For people who felt you did more work - "More work is directly proportional to amount of knowledge you get" I bet no one in the class would deny this :)

This is one of the best courses offered in ASU.

 

Okay, I know, I wrote a lot. What should I say? I learned quite a lot in this course. It is not my favorite topic, but still an interesting thing. My final grade won't be the best I think. In a certain way, one could argue that my grade reflects my attitude to this course. On the other hand I wonder, if there is a way of getting a good grade, even if one just want to have a glimpse at IR and not dedicating the whole semester to it ;)

 

 

 

CSE 574 [Spring 2008] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse574ss]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.57 Course: 4.23

 

CSE 574 Instructor Evaluation Spring 2008

Subbarao Kambhampati

23 What did you like most about this course?

 

Interesting topic, enthusiastic instructor. Very broad scope.

 

The materials covered in the class are very interesting. The ideas given by the instructor are very insightful.

 

The structuring as a "true" graduate class.

The instructor. The way he teaches and makes the students understand is just amazing. Clear thoughts, highly enthusiastic, great knowledge about the area and a really good teacher. The readings for each class which might seem kind of confusing before class is just "totally understood" after the class. Each class makes you think and learn new concepts, all credits to the instructor. Makes every topic interesting and can talk about anything a student can ask for. I just wanted the class to go for ever!

25  Comments

An excellent course for AI lovers. The instructor is just too good, amazing teacher and highly knowledgeable. Great learning experience and the best class I have taken so far. I wish there were some more classes!

 

 

 

CSE 471/598 [Fall 2007] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.74 (4.81UG;4.71G) Course: 4.37 (4.26 UG; 4.42 G)

 

CSE 471 Kambhampati Instructor Evaluation Fall 2007

Subbarao Kambhampati

SLN: 85349

23  What did you like most about this course?

 

 

Instructor par-excellence- very knowledgeable and creative with an outstanding sense of humor and very clear concepts. Extremely good examples given to explain concepts(nobody else can make the topic so clear).The instructor always promptly answered mails.
Very interesting course which motivates you towards AI. You learn a lot from the course.Highly recommended course(If you havent taken this course, you are missing something in life).

 

 

Instructor, Unbelievably good at communicating his ideas! Just makes the subject and class a magic!

 

The lectures were good--it was actually more time efficient to learn something by going to the lecture than by attempting to learn it myself, which is a refreshing change from some courses I've taken. Also, the instructor used humor in an appropriate way to enhance presentation of material.

 

Extra discussions carried out through the blog, and programming assignments.
And the enthusiasm and efforts of the instructor.

 

The pro activeness of the teacher to reach out to the students.

 

The high quality teaching

 

Just one word AWESOME and Rao rocks

 

The lecture is a good researcher in this topic

 

Materials are very nice, homeworks are useful.

 

It made me think

 

The subject matter was interesting.

 

This was my first AI course and I enjoyed how it related to many other classes that I've taken, such as the algorithms classes, statistics and probability, as well as philosophy.

 

Bayes networks & such

 

1. despite the difficulty of the projects they were defiantly a great learning tool.

2. the humor injected into the lectures by the instructor helped hold my attention during class and in some cases aided in my understanding of a topic

 

25  Comments

Overall a great introductory course to AI.

 

I wouldn't miss any course taught by Rao! Rao is just wow!

 

Good prof/good assignments/too demanding

 

After taking this course , my specialization is now AI, that expalins everything

 

I wish I had attended more classes.

 

overall i enjoyed this class despite the difficulty

 

 

 

 

 

CSE 494/598 [Spring 2007] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.82 (4.78 UG; 4.83 G) Course: 4.63 (4.58UG;4.64G)

 

CSE 598 Kambhampati Instructor Evaluation Spring 2007

Subbarao Kambhampati

23 What did you like most about this course?

Instructor, Instructor, Instructor. This course is all about what Rao makes it.
Quite seriously, Rao makes this course funner than it already is, what with
exploring the frontiers of the web and all. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to
forget Pagerank or why K-Means is random for quite some time.

And the Google-baiting - the icing on the cake :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Enthusiastic instruction of a very interesting topic.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Breadth of coverage of concepts which gives a very holistic view of Information
retrieval and mining on the internet

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the homeworks were interesting ...
projects gave a good exposre to web search techniques ...
the course touched lot of topics ..and still depth was satisfactory

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An excellent course. The best course I have ever taken in my Masters. I enjoyed
each and every lecture and it was wonderful.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Instructor's enthusiasm in the first place, the project was amazing and added
confidence in building large scale system in a fixed time.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. It's breadth AND depth - I learned so much!
2. Hands down the best slides I've seen for a course
3. Reading material - interesting papers available before being published

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The projects are very good.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It's related to my research. Through it, I really deepen my understanding of
knowledge in the related area.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Linking the class metrial to real world applications, and discussion of cutting
edge research in the class as conference papers etc. Dicussing and clarrifying
mathmatical concepts are relating to applications, which really helps to
clarrify certain ideas.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The way of teaching.

25 Comments

A wonderful course. I would usually go home with 1 or 2 new ideas after every
class. Great learning experience.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This course must be offered every semester for many students benefit

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr.Kambhampati is an amazing instructor I've ever come across, and the matter
presented in the course is very up-to-date. But somehow, compared to AI class
this class is less energetic, may be because some of the material looks trivial and
not much technical difficulty is involved, unlike in AI.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the best courses I've ever taken.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Really good course!
Really great instructor.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Great class. Enjoyed it and learned much.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The instructor is so smart, enthusiastic about work and good at teaching. It is
really challenging and even burdensome to follow the classes and deal with all the
required tasks, but I leant a lot. My experience of this course--''Both pain and
gain."

 

 

CSE 471/598 [Fall 2006] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.51 (4.34 UG; 4.67 G) Course: 4.18 (3.83UG;4.49G)

 

25  Comments

Overall, I'd rate this as the best CS course I've taken, period. Dr. Rao is
among the top professors in terms of his ability to teach and communicate
difficult ideas clearly. This course was HARD but it was certainly fair and
well worth the extreme effort I had to put into this elective.

 

Rao for demi-god-hood. The course was extremely hard. But it was enlightening,
educational and entertaining. I wish I had or could take more course both from the
instructor and in the field. Rao is in the top two of my favorite instructors here at
ASU-CSE and one of the few from whom I'd deliberately take another course.

 

One of the best classes I've ever had. Great teacher, great material. I would
recommend this class to any CS major that isn't scared of putting in hard work
to see great results come out at the end.

 


Well over all courses satisfaction is very high . The enthusiasm of instructor
is a thing to learn from the courses.
Every now then prof was putting insights to current work going on in some areas
and also links to other areas which gives a better understanding of wats going
on around .

 

A course by Rao..
itz just WOW !!


interesting readings he recommends,
we understand better every single depiction !!
Flawless way the lecture blends,
without a single point of contradiction !
For all the gr8 effort he spends,
his classes are a sure benediction !
But as this fascinating journey ends,
oops.. they've now become an addiction !!

Prof Rao.. you're just woww !!!


The Sanskrit saying is 'Na bhooto, na bhavishyati', which means: 'There has not
been and there never will be', used to describe something or someone that is
matchless or unique.. both the instructor and this course qualify to be so...

 

 

Great class overall.

 

Very good course. Very challenging. Unusual but more than fair grading policy.

 

 

Dr Kambhampati has a real enthusiasm for teaching. Even though the topics were
difficult, he made it fun.

 

This course is an excellent start to students interested in A.I

 

Very good introductory course to artificial intelligence

 

Can I take it a second time without doing his homeworks and projects?

 

 

23  What did you like most about this course?

Dr. Rao made this course the success it was. This course did an excellent job
exposing me to the field of AI and showing me a depth to the field I was not
aware existed. The course was mostly a high-level overview of the field due to
the vast breadth of AI, but he covered it well and made it make sense. The
instruction was extremely well done and that's what made every class worth
attending.

 

The entire course was wonderful, but the best part was the level of humor added to
learning what is some very difficult material.

 

Learning about logic (especially probabilistic), planning and search.

 

Great subject! Teacher is very enthusiastic about the material and does a great
job in getting the students to not only be excited about learning, but gives out
optional learning material to help take the course outside of classroom and
further the students grasp of the material.

 

- The enthusiasm of Dr. Rao to present interesting topics to the students
- The enthusiasm of Dr. Rao to encourage us to be interested in AI field
- I liked the topics of A* algorithm
- I liked how the answers of the homework were posted afterwards

 

Very interesting topics. Instructor very knowledgable and motivated.

 

Interesting material, enthusiastic presentation.

 

Adversarial search with Alpha-beta pruning was really the most interesting
concept we learned in my opinion.

 

The instructor's creative methods and ideas -- I think Rao makes the subject
matter related to AI come alive with his innovative presentation ideas in class and
the way he puts the subject across to students, especially first time pursuants of
AI.


He also makes the very good point that the demands and quality of a course
should certainly never be dictated by the place at which the course is being
offered, and should instead strive for a level on par with the best universities.

 

The subject matter was interesting. The textbook was pretty clear. The
instructor is very nice and cool.

 

The subjects. Programming projects.

 

the prof

The instructor teaches well indeed.

 

best part of this course are homework questions and assignments which enhance
the understanding greately.

 

Wide range of topics covered.
Grading
Instructor's Enthusiasm

 

Prof Rao's enthusiasm in teaching is excellent and it makes the course very
interesting. He covers every relevant topic in detail and keeps the students
interested with clever and frequently humorous analogies and metaphors. The
textbook and course contents complement each other well.

 

The instructor itself, you should surely meet him.

 

The way Rao teaches this class.

 

The course structure was well designed.
breadth and depth of courses was balanced.
projects were really interested.

 

Good, very good.

 

The engaging lectures, sheer enthusiasm Prof Rao puts in, the flawless
explanation of concepts, wonderful way of communication, fascinating projects
and the feeling we get finally after this enthusing journey of AI course that we
learnt a lott...
----------------------------------------------------
|Changing one of Einstein's quotes:: |
----------------------------------------------------
Imagine sitting in an engaging Rao's class,
an hour seems like a minute !
where as sitting in any other class lecture,
a minute seems like an hour..
............. that is Relativity !!! :-P

 

 

 

 

 

CSE 494/598 [Fall 2005] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.84 (4.94 UG; 4.80 G) Course: 4.58 (4.86UG;4.46G)

 

 

 

 What did you like most about this course?

Dr. Kambhampati is an outstanding instructor. Even though I learned many
techniques that I am already using on the job, taking the course just to have a
class from him would have been worth it.

Excellent instructor with a good sense of humor. One gets the impression that
he really knows what he talking about, it excites him, etc.

Posting the audio lecture on the web was extremely kind and useful, even for
those students who always attended class. In several instances, it was useful
in disambiguating information and was always handy as a reference to return to
in case of confusion (and in a course like this, there's always some level of
confusion!).

The projects were difficult but very educational. The final product of a search
engine with a handful of features was an accomplishment to be proud of.
Definitely one of the better programming projects I've written for a class.

The smorgasboard of topics covered and, more importantly and amazingly, how they
all fit together. To call this a survey course would be an understatement.


Rao's courses are consistently the hardest courses that I have taken -- and also
the courses I learn the most in.

The last-homework-is-the-final-exam was appreciated.

The lack of student presentations/student research projects was appreciated.

The "capstone" aspect of the course - pulling together a lot of different
subjects - makes it a unique course and keeps the interest high. I wish the
department offered more like it.

Instructor always related the course content to real applications and hence, it was
fun learning in class. Projects were very helpful, though bit difficult. But it was fun
working on them.

Projects were very challenging and helped us undertand the internal working of a
search engine along with the engineering issues involved. The course connected
many different computer science areas like IR, Machine Learning, Databases and
the interactions were really fascinating. Many of things we were using but didn't
know how they worked now makes more sense.

 

 

CSE 574 [Fall 2004] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse574]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.55 Course: 4.02

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

 

 

The approach of connecting progression, regression, plan space, refinement

planning, htn planning, and any other form of planning under a unifying framework --

while still retaining the ability to examine specific syntactic differences.

 

 

The wide variety of interesting ideas in the field, which I was relatively

unfamiliar with.

 

 

Stimulating course material.

Instructor enthusiasm and teaching style.

 

 

The subject. The professor.

 

 

The presentation of the course material is wonderful. Some of the topics were

explained so well that it would have taken me significant amount of time to read

and understand them on my own. The NASA talk was very helpful in understanding

the applications of some methodologies discussed in the class. It helped us

(the graduate students) in understanding how the research community works in

general, what are the several issues involved, how an area like planning evolved

over time, how several researchers have misconceptions about some topics and how

they were resolved, and lot of other things. Overall, the course gave a good

insight into the area of AI the instructor was successful in engaging the

students to learn about the cutting-edge research. I would recommend this

course to each and every graduate student in computer science.

 

 

 

I liked the breadth of topics related to planning which were covered in this course.

Liked the term project concept.

 

 

Projects and homeworks assignment made the concepts clear and also helped to

explore new research areas.

 

 

25

Comments

 

 

Learning would have been an interesting topic too. :)

 

 

Excellent class, but way too much course load. This is excellent preparation

for a grad student who wants to get into research, but not so much for someone

working fulltime who just wants to learn about AI planning.

 

 

A true graduate level research course

 

 

A good instructor

 

CSE 494/598 [Spring 2004] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.58 Course: 4.34 Overall: 4.5

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

 

 

What was there not to like.

 

 

The first half -- information retrieval, clustering,
crawling, dimensionality reduction.

 

 

I really liked the projects, they were very well thought out.� They
were right in line with the topics of the class as well.

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed the topics relating to collaborative and 
content based filtering, latent semantic indexing, and page rank.� 
The papers that formed the bulk of the literature for the course 
provided stimulating reading.� Class was always enjoyable because 
the instructor was very well prepared and gave powerful insights in 
the topics that were covered.� He definitely added value to the 
written materials that the course covered.� The projects were very 
amusing and the level of detail that was required provided ample 
opportunity for intellectual growth.

 

 

Learning about and applying "bleeding-edge" information retrieval 
techniques.
 
Learning about the merging of traditional structured databases and 
unstructured text and the management of such systems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The topics covered are very closely related to reality and very 
interesting. The instructor shows great enthusiasm in teaching and 
pointed out many interesting direction for future work.

 

 

I liked the presentation of the course material.� I am already 
familiar with some of the topics presented, but the instructor 
provided a different perspective to what I already know.� I greatly 
appreciate the instructor's enthusiasm towards the course.� He is 
highly motivated to make this course best and that really has a 
constructive impact on the students.� I wish all the instructors 
were like this :) I also liked how he related the in-class material 
with what is happening outside in the real world.� Time to time, he 
tried his best to keep the course material as up-to-date as 
possible.� I also liked how he brought his phylosophy and principles 
into the homework and midterm questions.� I love his homework and 
midterm questions (even though I wasn't able to answer them to 
perfection), because they not only cover the technical aspects of 
the course material but they also reflect the instructor's 
principles towards spiritual and psychological things.� One more 
thing is the metaphors that he uses to explain certain concepts.� I 
always get amazed by how clear his ideas are on any given topic.� 
Wake him up in the middle of night and ask him a question on any 
topic from the course, I am 200% confident that he will explain 
immediately without any hesitation.� Since he is very strong in his 
fundamentals and the course material, he was able to relate the 
topics to the real words aspects and explain very well.� The last 
thing is the course projects.� If not for this course, I wouldn't 
have sit and implemented vector space ranking, pagerank, auth/hubs 
and clustering algorithms.� Even though one is clear about the 
algorithms, implementing them and testing on realworld data and 
analyzing the results yields a satisfying experience.� 
 
Finally the TA's were awesome.� They were very helpful and gave 
constructive feedback on the homeworks and projects.� Their comments 
were very helpful.� They were available for any questions outside 
the class time and office hours.

 

 

Amazing instructor. The instructor is VERY VERY reasonable and 
DEFINTELY understands the students issues. He is very enthusiastic in 
the class which is a motivating factor.
 
The course material was "CURRENT" and the material was excellently 
presented.

 

 

I liked the fact that there was no definitive text book for the 
course. I liked the approach of teaching from published papers. It 
was a very challenging course, and was tough.

 

 

25

Comments

 

 

Overall, I would rate this course as one of the best courses I have 
taken but not as good as the other course (Intro to AI) offered by 
the same instructor.� The syllabus of the course is decent and I 
guess it would change according to the latest developments in the 
field in its next offering.� I would like to see more lectures on 
databases/information retrieval intersection.� The connection is 
interesting and possibly there could be one course project on this 
area.� A project on db/ir connection would certainly elevate the 
students' understanding on database concepts and at the same time 
would provide good insight into ir concepts.� 
 
Raspberry Bars are awesome!!!� This tradition should continue...

 

 

Great Course

 

 

 

It might be worth thinking about splitting the course into
two different courses. One on information retrieval and the
other on integration issues. Not only would this allow a more
detailed look at each topic, but the projects could be more
involved as well.

 

 

Thank you for a fantastic class.� It was great and very enlightening.

 

 

Kambhampati is the best professor at ASU. Hands down. I've had him 
two semesters in a row.

 

 

 

CSE 471/598 [Fall 2003] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471 ]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.73 Course: 4.35

 

 

23

What did you like most about this course?

 

 

instructor's enthusiasm and clear passion for the topics discussed

 

 

Interesting material, excellent instructor.

 

 

What was there not to like.

 

 

Rao uses real world examples, metaphores, stories, philosophies and

experiences to supplement an otherwise complex and at times

frustrating topic

 

 

This was an interesting course with an excellent instructor.

 

 

Everything. This is by far the best CSE course I have ever taken.

I learned something new every day, the instructor was well prepared

and funny. He also did a good job of sensing when he was

losing/boring the class and would switch tactics or subjects

accordingly.

 

 

Rao is an enthusiastic instructor. He took great care to prepare

materials (PowerPoint slides) for each lecture. He was very

approachable via email and quick to respond with help for homework

and projects, even at odd hours. I thought the midterm was fair

test that adequately covered the lecture and reading material from

the first half of the semester.

 

 

Covered a lot of material and demanded a lot from the students. I

learrned a lot of material.

 

 

Teacher was a cool guy, funny, made lectures interesting. Teacher

tried to make accomodations for students, and was pretty flexible.

Instructor takes feedback seriously and implements it.

 

 

As an avid SF reader, I have read about AI for years. I finally

wanted to see where reality was. While you will notice that the time

spent was the least favorite, I WOULD NOT change anything. While I

do not know if I could handle it, it would be refreshing to find all

coursework so stimulating (even if I cannot figure out why when it

was well presented, I grasped such a "mediocre" amount of this.

Maybe in a week or two it will be clear ;)

 

 

The instructor. EASILY the best professor I've ever had. Incredibly

engaging during class. Used a combination of slides, board learning,

and lecture to communicate ideas to students. Personally, I think

that's the best method of teaching. Frequent homeworks/projects made

sure that students were actually learning. Frequently sent e-mails

with additional notes on various subjects.

Oh yeah, the raspberry bars were great, too.

Take care, Dr. Rao. If there's an award for best CS instructor, you

should win it.

 

 

I liked the enthusiasm and high-quality efforts that instructor puts

in this class. For a change (or let me rephrase that �for the first

time ever) I saw an instructor who just didn't come to class and read

PowerPoint slides and leave. The projects were great and made

material more interesting. Discussion in class was very thought

provoking and interesting...ohh also I recommend this class to all

those lonely people out there who feel that they are not

loved....just take Prof.Rao's class and you will get 10 email from

him everyday ;)

 

 

Logic and learning

 

 

Learning about variety and techniques in AI, how it relates and can

be applied into other fields. It provided a meaning for previous

courses like CSE310, where concepts are taught, but in AI, they are

put to a test. Many of the learnings can be applied into even day-to-

day life. Dr. Rao showed great enthusiasm into the class and created

a lot of followers. He was ALWAYS available, by eMail or in person,

and so were the T.A.s. Rao. He also facilitated extra sessions for

help in lectures and projects. He facilitated the tools needed for

comprehension. We were not short of communication, two days would'nt

pass without an eMail from Dr.

 

 

everything

 

 

The instructor showed enthusiasm to teach the course and always

motivated students to learn. I liked the course slides very much

(especially the intro slide in every class). Overall, it is a

wonderful course and I (think) I learnt a lot of useful stuff.

25

Comments

 

 

Good overview

In my best comic book store guy impression. "Best class _ever_"

 

 

 

 

 

Rao is one of the best CS teachers at ASU. Very demanding class but

worth it.

 

 

 

Had to give you a "poor" on #6 not because weight is unfair, but

because we have no idea how weight is determined.

Nice job, Dr. Rao. I can't stand your grading system, but other than

that you're a darn good teacher.

 

 

While we might all be stressed out and occasionally wish we had less

homework/assignments, the even-tempered approach and "relentless"

push to drive us to complete your assignements, was overall good. It

was good that you surveyed "stress level" and published grade

standings as while I took this class to fulfill a "dark" hunger for

knowledge about AI, my own personal fears about failing an "elective"

class relentlessly hounded me throughout the semester (and until I

get my grades ;) )

 

 

 

The large workload was tough to handle, but it stimulated learning.

I was able to make sure that I knew various subjects by testing my

knowledge frequently.

 

I definitely learned a lot. Liked the class. Dr. Rao was very

helpfull.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The course is very good as it is now. It'll be good it gets updated

everytime it is offered to cover latest developments in the area.

 

 

Prof.Rao is Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.

 

 

CSE 574 [Spring 2003] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse574]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.89 Course: 4.43 Overall: 5.0

 

 

What did you like most about this course?

 

 

All of the material was very thought provoking and interesting. I

thoroughly enjoyed the subject of temporal planning and especially

liked the chance to create my own classic and temporal domains. All

of the projects and homeworks were well thought out and allowed me to

discover some of the ideas and concepts on my own rather than

memorizing them from the lecture.

 

 

I liked the instructor's ability to communicate ideas through use of

real-life examples of theory.

 

 

The way teacher communicated ideas.

 

 

Great course, great lectures. Every class was full of enthusiam and

had loads of crazy, funny, and great examples.

 

 

Very good instructor and course content , he teaches from the

basics . Homeworks and projects were very challenging and useful to

understand the subject in-depth

 

 

 

Comments

 

 

I took CSE471 with Dr. Kambhampati some time ago and enjoyed it. I

always wanted to take the planning class but missed it in the past due

to time constraints. I am glad it was offered again and hope that it

can be offered at least once a year. This topic is interesting,

thought-provoking, and practical. Plus, Dr. Kambhampati is one of the

best instructors I've had. His lectures needed little outside

clarification (which I think explains his sometimes-spoken-about empty

office during his office hours. :) ). The slides are a great help and

the note-taking program is helpful in that it keeps students involved

in the class.

Thank you.

 

 

The course helped me fill in a lot of holes in my understanding of

the subject.

 

 

The definition and application of criteria for grading wasn't really

clear, however I am not sure whether this is a advantage or

disadvantage.

 

 

CSE 494 [Fall 2002] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.72 Course: 4.48 Overall: 4.47

 

 

 

What did you like most about this course?

 

 

Phenomenal instructor. Very enthusiastic and passionate about the
topics covered.
Topics are current and constantly updated.

 

 

excellent instructor and course, learned a lot

 

 

The topics covered.

 

 

Too much to list.� Excellent Professor.� 'nuff said
Surprisingly, I liked the "Stanfordness" of the course.� No textbook,
read the papers, listen to the lectures, wimps can leave anytime.

 

 

This course was very very interesting. I have never had a course
which was this intense. Too much work but I enjoyed it!

 

 

teacher, communication

 

 

The course itself

 

 

great teacher, the best i have had so far, great subject matter also.

 

 

The Class was interactive and the instructor was very helpful and
made sure that the subject was understood

 

Comments

 

 

I would recommend this course to anyone because I think introduces
concepts that can be used in many areas of CS. Also, even though I
didn't care for the matrix math much, I learned more about the subject
in this class then I did in the Linear Alg. class!� 

 

 

Dr. K is hardcore.� Keep it up.

 

 

Dr. Rao has been one of the best instructors I have ever had. I
loved this course and the way he taught it.

 

 

It is a useful course

 

 

Excellent course

 

 

CSE 471 [Fall 2001] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471 ]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.58 Course: 4.32 Overall: 4.70

 

·       WOW he is the best prof I have had at ASU & he has inspired me more than just in AI & academically I wish all my classes were fun w/ real-life practical examples

·       Professor made the class very enjoyable and entertaining. At the same time, he made the material easy to understand and apply

·       It was nice to see a prof. that demonstrated great enthusiasm for the subject. Presentations were much better than most other classes. Difficult to find a prof. like this at ASU

·       The course gave a purpose to past courses in algorithms. [..]

·       Interesting. Actually practical. Organized.

·       Projects explored concepts w/o bogging down in details of coding

·       The instructors enthusiam for the subject. Great visual aids. Instructor cares about students actually learning

·       I liked the information on the course. Very interesting.

 

CSE 494 [Spring 2001] [Course page: http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse494-s01 ]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.55 Course: 4.24 Overall: 4.67

 

·      Best course I've taken at ASU

·      I liked that I got the chance to put the ideas we learned about search engines and XML project because I was very interested in that coming into the class

·      The intensity of the material

·      I really liked being able to break down the inner workings of both crawlers and also google. It was a completely new field of knowledge for me, but one I had thought about before. Awesome class Rao!

·      The search techniques and how current the information was. Provided good real world examples of where many of the techniques we discussed were used.

·      Cut a wide swath across a broad diverse range of information retrieval/integration topics without glossing over difficult topics. Good use of overhead slides and computer projection. Professor enthusiasm

·      Actually applying some math from previous classes

·      Teacher was very prompt in getting back with the e-mail. I was able to use course material in practice.

·      All topics were interesting and cutting edge

·      Instructor very enthusiastic


 

CSE 471 Fall 2000

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.10 Course: 4.30 Overall: 4.05

 

·      The teacher makes the class interesting. Teacher sent out huge amounts of support emails and related material.

·      The professor really seemed to know the subject material well

·      The professor's way of teaching

·      The challenge (sic)

·      Very fascinating subject material

·      Dynamic lecture, projects and textbook

·      The applications to real life problems

 

CSE 591E Spring 2000

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.85 Course: 4.55 Overall: 4.89

·      The processor are very enthusiasm and the materials are very good (sic)

·       The way the professor pushes us to study and think about the field.

·      Very open and inquiring approach to learning the various topics. Not afraid to digress or ponder issues not explicitly in the reading.

 

 

CSE 471 [Fall 1999]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.45 Course: 4.21 Overall: 4.30

 

·      ROA (sic). He is a great teacher who makes a very complex subject seem only a little complex.

·      Almost everything

·      The programming projects These let me really understand the algorithms presented

·      The instructor is very inthusiasic (sic) about the topic. Labs were challenging

·      --Everything --I enjoyed very much

·      Very good instructor, interest material (of course). I enjoyed the labs as well.

·      Projects. Depth of analysis behind theories looking at performance comparisons and ho don't always get what expect (sic).

·      Instructor presented well

·      Humor

·      The instructor had a strong interest in teaching the subject. Humor in the lectures was also good

·      Prof. Easily available for questions

·      I truly enjoyed the planning and bayes network stuff

·      The LISP project (once I got over the language barrier) were very helpful to understanding

 

CSE 574 [Spring 1999]

CEAS Averages: Instructor: 4.65 Course: 4.52 Overall:4.56

 

·      Being in tune with the latest papers

·      -Very up-to-date topics �relation to current research -- Great homeworks, projects

·      The material was very good, the programming assignments helped a lot to understand the theory

 

 

 



[1] The complete set of original evaluation sheets are available both with Prof. Kambhampati and with the CSE department.