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]

 

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.

 

 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).

 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!

 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

 

 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 :)

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Enthusiastic instruction of a very interesting topic.

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

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

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

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

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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

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The projects are very good.

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

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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.

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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.

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This course must be offered every semester for many students benefit

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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.

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One of the best courses I've ever taken.

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Really good course!
Really great instructor.

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Great class. Enjoyed it and learned much.

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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

 

 

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.