Courses

Courses for Masters at University of Pretoria

2003:

• ERS280: Software Management and economics

2004:

• ERN270: Computer Networks
• ENA732: Research Methodology

2005:

• ERV780: Advanced Microprocessor system design

Courses for PhD at UCSB

Fall 2008:

• CS276: Advanced Topics in Networking (Ben Zhao): Focuses on advanced topics in networking. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Internet analysis, routing techniques, multimedia, approaches for network performance enhancements, and communication over new technologies.
  • Project: Devising a gateway location metric for B.A.T.M.A.N in rural areas
• CS279: Advanced Topics in Security (Giovanni Vigna): Security analysis of networked systems. Analysis of techniques for network scanning, spoofing, hijacking, and denial-of-service attacks. Vulnerability analysis of applications and web-based systems. Intrusion detection and prevention techniques
• CS595n: Seminar on social computing (Kevin Almeroth): Information and methods, information credibility and trust, collective action
  • Talk: Reflection on ICT projects in rural areas
• CS501: Techniques of Computer Science Teaching: Course emphasizes teaching skills, practical experience, and communication skills
  • Talk: Learn to love windsurfing

Spring 2009:

• CS270F: Cognitive wirelss networking, strategy, economics and social behavioours (Heather Zheng): Cognitive networking, economics in wireless networks, strategy and game theory, online spectrum auctions, bio-inspired networks, Vanets
  • Project: An online spectrum auction system, bridging the implementation gap
• CS230: Approximations, NP-Completeness and Algorithms (Teo Gonzalez): Epsilon approximations, PTAS and FPTAS. Techniques for the design of approximation algorithms. P, NP, NP-complete problems, polynomial transformations, Turing reductions, strong NP-completeness, NP-hardness and inapproximability results. Topics in algorithms include: amortized analysis, advanced graph algorithms and data structures.
  • Course website

Fall 2009:

• CS225: Information Theory (Wim van Dam): Entropy, mutual information, and Shannon's coding theorems; lossless source coding, Huffman, Shannon-Fano-Elias, and arithmetic codes; Channel capacity; rate-distortion theory, and lossy source coding; source-channel coding; algorithmic complexity and information; applications of information theory in various fields
  • Final paper: Network Information theory for a multi-node network
  • Course website
• CS290I: Multimodal Interaction on Mobile Computing Platforms (Matthew Turk) Multimodal interaction on mobile computing platforms. Utilizing multiple sensors and interaction modalities on smart phones to create novel capabilities and experiences. State-of-the-art mobile phones have cameras, accelerometers, GPS, magnetometers, microphones, keyboards, and touch-sensitive displays, not to mention ever-increasing computation power and memory, graphics capabilities, and various communications capabilities. How do we create applications that take advantage of this rich computing platform. All projects were done on the Nokia N900.
  • Project: Musiccoach - Realtime evaluation of music performance
    • Final paper
    • Final presentation
    • Code
  • Course website

Winter 2010:

• CS290F: Networking for Multimedia (Kevin Almeroth): Relationship between multimedia, specifically audio and video, and delivery over various kinds of networks. Mmultimedia encoding and compression; error impact and artifact concealment; strategies for real-time content streaming; and challenges of large-scale multimedia systems
  • Project: Internet usage and performance analysis of a rural wireless network in Macha, Zambia

Spring 2011:

• CS290D: Advanced Data Mining Techniques (Xifeng Yan): Course introduces the principles, algorithms, and applications of sequential pattern, graph mining, link analysis, social network, streaming data, massive data analysis, and other topics in data mining.
  • Final project: Instant Message locality and topic extraction in rural networks
  • Course website

Fall 2011:

• CS290C: Virtualization and Cloud Computing Technologies (Chandra Krintz): Infrastructure/Platform/Software As A Service. Public, Private and Hybrid clouds. Resource virtualization and isolation, Virtual machines (Process or System VMs), Virtual memory, Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs), Virtualizing I/O, Hypervisors
  • Project presentation: Auto-scaling and cloud bursting service for Eucalyptus

Major Area Exam at UCSB (12 March 2010)

• Topic: Licence-free wireless networks for developing regions: reflection and future directions
  • Presentation
  • Reading list