• Course content and projects changed mid-course. Content of lectures was never tested or used for grading purposes. Projects did not reflect knowedge gained in lectures. Therefore lectures not useful to attend in most cases.
• She seems to really know how to do research, and teach people how to do research. She routinely discussed aspects of each paper that we should take note of that make the paper strong. She talked about details that can help a paper get accepted to top conferences, where to look for papers, and why it can be better to check conference programs rather than journals for current research. Her way of leading discussions, balanced (both applied and theoretical project options) work, and insight (this was most beneficial) is a good model for the other advanced topics courses. She also gave many ideas for interesting open problems, and showed us some of her work with her students that is relevant to the area. It really gave the impression that she knows whats going on. Sometimes the details of the algorithms were a little hard to grasp at first. Also, configuring the different hacking software was challenging. Leeron was a really helpful TA.
• This course did not require students to learn any of the material in the class. Assignments were totally unrelated and trivial. Professor did not seem to review notes prior to classes, was difficult to access outside of class, and did not seem to care that students learned the material. I find it unfortunate that thousands of dollars are spent on courses that are taught horribly, without any apparent care about whether students were learning. She seemed more interested in her research than the class which 20+ students pay a lot of money for. I was very disappointed with this class as I was not challenged and the teacher was completely not engaging.
• I was really looking forward to this course at the beginning of the semester, as it is a subject area that I was very interested in. The class turned out to be totally worthless. It was a waste of everyone's time and money. The professor missed 4 or 5 classes out of the semester, and when she was there she appeared to be reading her slides for the first time while lecturing. In my opinion this is totally unacceptable. Students pay nearly $3000 for each class, and we should be able to expect classes to be well organized and executed, and the professors to be well prepared. I will never take another course with this professor again, and I would not recommend her to anyone else.
• The material was all over the place with little structure. Topics seemed so disjoint, that it was difficult to follow the flow from one class to the next. I would prefer fewer topics with greater depth, logically building up knowledge each week. The first assignment was way too easy, taking only an hour or two once you understood how to use the tools, which were not that hard. The only stuff I really learned was in the final project. If we could have had more time to work on that, and allowed us to go into greater depth, that would have been interesting. Perhaps a choice - 10 pages and a presentation, or 16-20 pages and no presentation. I did not get much out of the student presentations.