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ECE 314

PROBABILITY IN ENGINEERING LAB

Spring 2024


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: Campuswire.

Self-enrollment Code for Campuswire: 4571

There is a 50 minute in-person session for the course weekly on Wednesdays in Room 2013 ECEB at 11am (Section A) and 2pm (Section B). There will be weekly laboratory assignments, and the deadline for handing in each lab assignment is 10:00 pm the first Tuesday after the lab period it was assigned (or if that Tuesday is during semester break, then a week later). At these sessions, the TA will present a fifteen-minute overview of the week's lab assignment. After that, students bringing laptop computers can begin working on the lab using their laptops.

We plan to have quizzes every other week on Wednesdays in class. So quiz dates are January 31, February 14, 28, March 20, April 3, 17, and May 1. Quizzes will be given in class at the beginning of the class period. The quizzes will be 25 minutes in length and cover material from the previous two labs. Students reading the pre-lab material listed on the course syllabus page for each lab and thoughtfully doing the labs should have no problem with the quizzes without additional studying for them. Weekly in person attendance is strongly encouraged. The lectures will not be recorded but video links are available in the syllabus. Grading will be 80% based on the lab assignments and 20% based on the quizzes using the same policy for letter grades explained on the website for ECE 313. The lowest lab assignment score and lowest quiz score 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 Canvas learning management system. An overview video for each lab is posted on the syllabus page.

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): Kel Levick NetID: klevick2

Office Hours: Tuesdays 2-4pm (ECEB 3036) and Thursdays 4-5pm (online; Zoom)

Instructor: B. Hajek NetID: b-hajek

Getting Started

The lab assignments will be distributed to you via Canvas. Turn in the lab assignment by uploading your Jupyter notebook (.ipynb) file back to Canvas 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.