ECE 314

PROBABILITY IN ENGINEERING LAB

Spring 2021


All ECE 313 students are encouraged to take this optional one hour course. This course counts as technical elective credit for CE and EE majors and (software) laboratory credit for EE majors.


This one credit-hour course is designed to be taken concurrently with ECE 313 Probability with Engineering Applications. The course will strengthen your understanding of the concepts in ECE 313 through computer simulation and computation, and expose you to a variety of applications. It will help prepare you for follow on courses using probability, computation, and analysis of data.

Syllabus and Recommended Readings

Question and Answer Group: Piazza

There are 14 lab assignments and 6 Quizzes, contributing to 80% and 20% of the total grade respectively. The lowest lab assignment score (out of 14) and lowest quiz score (out of 6) will be dropped.

Labs: One lab is assigned each week. Due times are Tuesdays 10pm (Central Time). You can download the labs and upload your solutions on Compass2g . An overview video for each lab is posted on the syllabus page.

Quizzes: There are 6 Quizzes: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7. We cancelled Quiz 4 for you because it falls on a non-instructional day. You will take the quizzes online through CBTF and Zoom on every other Wednesday evening, beginning at 7pm (Central Time), beginning with Quiz 1 on Wednesday, February 10. Each quiz is brief and covers material you should have learned in doing the previous two labs. Quiz durations are 30 minutes total, accounting for solving the quiz using pencil and paper, scanning and uploading solutions. Please read the quiz instructions. You will need a computer to log into Gradescope and a smart phone or tablet device with camera to scan your solutions into a pdf file or set of image files. Please try Quiz 0 on Gradescope to practice scanning and uploading before Quiz 1.

Course Policy on Absences: Course policy is to not grant excused absences beyond dropping the lowest quiz score and lowest lab assignment score. Many students at some time during the semester for one reason or another miss due to illness, funeral, etc. that is beyond their control and we apply the policy uniformly, unless there is a major disruption for multiple weeks.

Teaching Assistant (Name and NetID): Zeyu Zhou NetID: zzhou51

Live Zoom Office Hours: Mondays 4pm-5pm and Tuesdays 9am-10am on Zoom (link posted on Piazza). Extra individual office hours are possible; please email Zeyu to schedule.

Instructor: B. Hajek NetID: b-hajek

Getting Started

The lab assignments will be distributed to you via Compass2g. Turn in the lab assignment by uploading your Jupyter notebook (.ipynb) file back to Compass2g each week. We will be using Jupyter to work with Jupyter notebook files (extension .ipynb). Jupyter is being used broadly worldwide across many packages and languages including Python. You should update the software there to Version 7.5 Ipython / Jupyter using Python version 3.7. There are numerous tutorials on the web to help you get started, such as for:

We recommend downloading the Anaconda package, which includes everything you need. It works well on Mac OS X and Windows.

In addition, you can download Lab 0 here, or see Lab 0 as a static web page here. Lab 0 is not to be handed in; it is most of the first lab that deals with the introduction to Python. If you have multiple Python projects, perhaps for different courses you are taking, and different packages are needed, Python virtual environments might be quite helpful.

A note on collaboration and academic integrity reporting

We encourage you to discuss the labs with each other to help you understand the labs and formulate solutions. However, you are expected to write up on your own each lab you turn in, including both code and Markdown cells. If course staff detects identical or nearly identical notebooks handed in by two or more students, all students involved will be assigned a zero score for that lab, including those who wrote the code and those who copied. According to University policy, whenever a penalty of any magnitude is imposed for violation of academic integrity, it is mandatory for course staff to file an academic integrity report that could go into your student record. See Students' Quick Reference Guide to Academic Integrity for more information. The consequences for a first offense can be significant/disturbing. The bottom line: please make sure to write your own answers in the notebooks you turn in, and don't help others violate the policy.

If you have any questions, please discuss with the instructor or a TA.