ECE 314

PROBABILITY IN ENGINEERING LAB

Fall 2017

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

This one-hour credit course is designed to be taken concurrently with ECE 313 Probability in Engineering Systems. 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 Reading

There will be weekly laboratory assignments. Students must be present at the beginning of each lab period to take the brief quiz on the lab that was just due. In addition, after the quiz, a TA will present a fifteen minute overview of the week's lab. We encourage students to stay present and work on the labs together for at last an hour after that, although students can work later on their own time, either in the lab or remotely or on their own computers. Final laboratory reports will be due six days after the lab. Grading will be 80% based on the labs and 20% on the quizzes. The lowest lab score and lowest quiz score will not be counted.

Teaching Assistants: Xiyang Liu NetID: xiyangl2 and Zeyu Zhou NetID: zzhou51

Office Hours: 6:00-7:30 pm Tuesdays, Room 2022 ECE Building

                       7:00-8:30 pm Wednesdays, Room 2022 ECE Building

Instructor: B. Hajek NetID: b-hajek

Section Meeting time in Room 2022 ECE Building
A 9-10:50 am Thursdays
B 11 am - 12:50 pm Thursdays
C 1-2:50 pm Thursdays

Question and answer group: Piazza

Getting Started

The lab assignments will be distributed to you on uiuc compass and turned in by you by uploading your iPython notebook (.ipynb) file back to compass each week. We will be using Jupyter to work with jupiter (formerly call ipython) notebook files (extension .ipynb) on the EWS Linux machines. Jupyter is being used broadly worldwide across many packages and languages including python. The Jupyter installation supports IPython Version 4, and is built over Python version 2.7XX (not 3.4XX). To get started on an EWS Linus machine, run the following commands in a terminal window:

module load jupyterPy27/4.0.6
jupyter notebook

Also, if you put the first of these two lines into your .bashrc file, then the next time you log in, you will be able to use just the second line to open jupyter.

[If that doesn't work and you see the word "Canopy" somewhere in the error messages, open canopy by typing "canopy" from a terminal window, and from the canopy preferences, make sure you are NOT choosing Canopy as your default for Python. Then logout and log in again.]

If you are working on labs on your own machines you should update the software there to Version 4 Ipython / Jupyter using Python version 2.7XX. For Mac OS X the Anaconda/Jupyter download works well. There are numerous tutorials on the web to help you get started, such as for:

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 laboratory, 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 TA.