Every week there was a guest speaker that talked about their line of work. These talks were pretty interesting and became a motivation to wake up on Fridays. Sometimes Prof Gafni would interrupt these talks, which got kind of annoying. The homework and discussion sections sometimes strayed pretty far from the material in the actual talk, but they were still fair. Sone HWs look harder than they actually are. The quizzes are also pretty straightforward.

This class is a breeze, and even the confusing homework takes no longer than an hour each week. I'd say I was interested in about half the lectures, and genuinely interested in 3 of them out of 10 (Nachenberg's self driving cars breakdown, since he's such a good lecturer, Palsberg's quantum computing, and Nowatzki's architecture), so the class was worth it in the end. The easiest way to mess up is just forgetting to do the work. Gafni himself lives up to his reputation, the few times he interrupted or just spoke at all angering me in a way I didn't know before possible.

"AI is thriving; traditional computing is declining" is this class in a nutshell. Perhaps it'll move on to the next computing buzzword in a few years (quantum computing?). I'm not really that fascinated by AI, nor do I think it's a magic panacea, so the constant focus on this subject kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Even if you're really into AI/ML, this course tries to dumb things down too much, so that all you'll learn are some vague, high-level generalizations.

The quizzes essentially just test your ability to search for keywords within a PDF or Powerpoint. Plus, your lowest score gets dropped. The weekly homework vary in difficulty: some are literally just math (matrices), while others are quite challenging algorithm/cryptography problems. My TA wasn't good at explaining the homework, so I sometimes needed to google concepts.

This class is absolutely awful and had me questioning if I should be a CSE major within the first week of the course. The professor is rude and interrupts his guests with pointless questions, and he often holds the class late or gets upset when people ask questions about the material. This is a joke of a seminar, and nobody who took it walked out with anything other than headaches assigned by the grad student TAs. They assume everyone has a perfect knowledge of linear algebra and assembly code. Some homework took 5 seconds, and other assignments had students scratching their heads for 2 hours over a question or essay prompt that didn't make sense. CS majors shouldn't have to take this class, but alas, they must, so use it as an opportunity to see which guest speakers you should avoid like the plague, based on their teaching abilities.

The lectures given by the guests speakers were all for the most part very interesting. Professor Gafni, however, would all too often interject in the middle of these lectures with otherwise useless comments and very awkward fringe disagreements with the guest lecturer. The TA Zhehui Zhang pretty much ran the rest of the course, as she made the homework assignments and quizes. She was rarely clear (not to mention that she herself admitted to not knowing how to do one of her assignments), the assignments rarely made sense, and the quizes basically required you to download the slides from the lecture and have it up during the quiz. The lectures made the course feel like it was introducing you to many different concepts within the field of computer science, getting you excited to take the upper division class equivalents. Zhang focused way too hard on the conceptual side of things, expecting you to essentially learn (albeit a very small part) of these courses. Not really too difficult, but it did kill a bit of the excitement.

Easy 1 unit class. I hardly ever saw or heard the professor unless he was interrupting the guest speaker. Before each quiz, review the powerpoint from the previous week, and you should be good. Homeworks could be confusing, but just join a groupme, and usually someone will have some basic explanation so you can get through it. Overall, just a basic way to expose people to whats happening with computer science right now.

The class is a breeze and free one unit A. The quizzes and homework assignments are very basic and the lectures are very interesting. Highly recommend!

Lectures given by various staff about areas they're working on. Homework was created by TAs to supposedly reflect the lecture. HW can be challenging, but isn't really graded harshly if at all, so it does not really matter. They started off as fairly related to lectures, then kinda stopped being that relevant. I feel like the TAs just started getting lost about how they could make something relevant.

Talks were hit or miss. A good opportunity to ask questions to professors though. Gafni would often interrupt the speakers or challenge them which was a bit jarring. Most speakers shrugged it off pretty quickly though.

Quizzes were just random things brought up in the talks.

tl;dr: take it if ur required to, otherwise don't.

class is structured like this: every week theres a guest speaker, and we would have a open note 30 min quiz on what the guest speaker says next week. we also have hw every week which sometimes is super easy and sometimes is completely unrelated to lecture content and super confusing.

we can tell that this class is entirely TA led. gafni did very little, but our TAs were pretty cool ig. quizzes oftentimes had typoes or were super ambigious so beware. but one quiz/one hw does get dropped at the end sooo,.

honestly idt this class was graded too harshly on the hw. we bs'ed a lot of it and got good scores on them. quizzes were 5 mc questoins each, and sometimes easy (like u can ctrl f the powerpoint slides) and sometimes super weird.

If youre reading this and this helped you out, pls review ur profs!! itll help us all out uwu

Professor Gafni doesn’t lecture at all in this seminar. Every week, a guest speaker (professor usually teaching a CS graduate course) comes and presents an overview of a specific subfield in computer science. Many of the topics are quite niche and interesting (ex: self-driving vehicles, quantum computing). I remember one time professor Carey Nachenberg came and talked about his job at Lyft working in the self-driving car sector.

The grading is 70% weekly quizzes, 30% homework. Lowest quiz and homework score dropped. You’ll take the quiz during each discussion section, and the quiz is on the most recent lecture. The quizzes were all multiple choice, open note. Don’t stress about them; the questions are pretty straightforward and if you paid attention in lecture, you’ll do just fine. For the more specific ones, you can refer to the lecture slides on CCLE.

Homework was given at each discussion, due the following lecture. Many assignments were very challenging and were algorithmic puzzle problems. But the TA’s were very lenient on homework grading (they graded all the HW towards week 10, so I guess they just checked for completion). Don’t worry if you aren’t able to get the correct solution for the HW. My biggest regret for this course is spending too much time on the HW, as they were graded very easily.

Overall, would definitely recommend. The topics are so fascinating and really made me appreciate the variety of not-so-obvious applications of CS. Note the grade I entered for this review is the grade I predict I will get (since final grades aren’t out yet).