Professor
Yuan Tian
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2024 - Professor Tian is literally the GOAT, on par with Nader. The class has three in-person quizzes, open internet, but no help from LLMs and it was honestly pretty easy. She provides practice quizzes, sometimes with the same questions as the real quiz. The group project is pretty okay too but if you do an ML-based project, make sure you have good hardware because its lowkey pay2win. Definitely recommend taking this course--its an easy A elective.
Fall 2024 - Professor Tian is literally the GOAT, on par with Nader. The class has three in-person quizzes, open internet, but no help from LLMs and it was honestly pretty easy. She provides practice quizzes, sometimes with the same questions as the real quiz. The group project is pretty okay too but if you do an ML-based project, make sure you have good hardware because its lowkey pay2win. Definitely recommend taking this course--its an easy A elective.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2022 - Computer Security. A really interesting and light class! If you want to learn about cybersecurity for writing software, this is the best class to take. There is a lot of pretty relevant stuff for if you want to do software engineering, security engineering, or security research. This was the first class taught by this professor so there were some hiccups since a lot of the lecture content went really fast since the syllabus was originally designed for a semester system college. However, this was made up by the pacing of assignments. The grading structure was the following: 3 homework assignments (30%) but you can drop one, literature review (15%), participation in feedback to others’ work (5%), course project (50%). No exams or quizzes. The homework assignments covered software security (think attack lab in CS 33), web security, and mobile security. Tooling was a little bit tricky at first but the assignments were only 1-2 parts and were meant to be light. There was a warmup lab done by the TA in class that walked through something similar to the homework assignments. The final project was really cool. You could either pick to do a security research project (there was a list of options and I think one group even proposed their own) or you can do a bug bounty on a real company's website (groups did companies like Twitch, Ikea, and GitHub). What's really cool is that the professor grades the project based on effort / completion rather than actual results of finding bugs which is kind of hard. The project was broken up into three presentations; introduction Presentation (5%), midterm (5%), final (15% from Yuan’s and peer’s evaluation); and two reports: midterm (5%), final (10%); and a teammate evaluation (10%). You can get extra credit by doing the course evaluation (1% bonus). Everyone in the class was super chill and everyone just gave everyone 100%. Paper presentations were also quite chill, it was just a group project where you had to explain something about one of the papers the class was reading. Pretty chill. The full syllabus I linked below. Syllabus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w0TKAI_ANBIvPzXLWYj7mRld6J-hQxCeu2U9PYqwGpg/edit?usp=sharing I definitely think there are some improvements that could be made about the course but overall, it was really interesting and the workload was very light. I think most if not all people in the class got an A. A lot of people compare this class to CS 136 and I think honestly if you want to learn about cybersecurity, this one just makes a lot more sense. It's easier, the final project is cooler, and the subject material is more up to date and relevant. The topics are also slightly different so you could definitely take both. For example, mobile , IoT, and machine learning security are topics not covered in CS 136 that are pretty cool to learn about and sound pretty relevant. Highly recommend taking this class, it was pretty cool! Update: they changed this course to a permanent course called ECE 117.
Fall 2022 - Computer Security. A really interesting and light class! If you want to learn about cybersecurity for writing software, this is the best class to take. There is a lot of pretty relevant stuff for if you want to do software engineering, security engineering, or security research. This was the first class taught by this professor so there were some hiccups since a lot of the lecture content went really fast since the syllabus was originally designed for a semester system college. However, this was made up by the pacing of assignments. The grading structure was the following: 3 homework assignments (30%) but you can drop one, literature review (15%), participation in feedback to others’ work (5%), course project (50%). No exams or quizzes. The homework assignments covered software security (think attack lab in CS 33), web security, and mobile security. Tooling was a little bit tricky at first but the assignments were only 1-2 parts and were meant to be light. There was a warmup lab done by the TA in class that walked through something similar to the homework assignments. The final project was really cool. You could either pick to do a security research project (there was a list of options and I think one group even proposed their own) or you can do a bug bounty on a real company's website (groups did companies like Twitch, Ikea, and GitHub). What's really cool is that the professor grades the project based on effort / completion rather than actual results of finding bugs which is kind of hard. The project was broken up into three presentations; introduction Presentation (5%), midterm (5%), final (15% from Yuan’s and peer’s evaluation); and two reports: midterm (5%), final (10%); and a teammate evaluation (10%). You can get extra credit by doing the course evaluation (1% bonus). Everyone in the class was super chill and everyone just gave everyone 100%. Paper presentations were also quite chill, it was just a group project where you had to explain something about one of the papers the class was reading. Pretty chill. The full syllabus I linked below. Syllabus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w0TKAI_ANBIvPzXLWYj7mRld6J-hQxCeu2U9PYqwGpg/edit?usp=sharing I definitely think there are some improvements that could be made about the course but overall, it was really interesting and the workload was very light. I think most if not all people in the class got an A. A lot of people compare this class to CS 136 and I think honestly if you want to learn about cybersecurity, this one just makes a lot more sense. It's easier, the final project is cooler, and the subject material is more up to date and relevant. The topics are also slightly different so you could definitely take both. For example, mobile , IoT, and machine learning security are topics not covered in CS 136 that are pretty cool to learn about and sound pretty relevant. Highly recommend taking this class, it was pretty cool! Update: they changed this course to a permanent course called ECE 117.
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