ECE 598

Spring 2022 All Classes

All Classes

Special Topics in ECE

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 0 TO 4 hours.

Subject offerings of new and developing areas of knowledge in electrical and computer engineering intended to augment the existing curriculum. See Class Schedule or departmental course information for topics and prerequisites.

May be repeated in the same or separate terms if topics vary.

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ECE 598 class schedule data for spring 2022
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
44432	Lecture	AM	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	2015 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Miller, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Ideal Funct. in Cryptography Section Info: Ideal Functionalities in Cryptography. The Ideal Functionalities model (or “Universal Composability” (UC)) is considered the gold standard for defining security in many cryptographic tasks, such as multiparty computation and zero knowledge proofs. It is a unification of property-based definitions, where instead of describing one property at a time (i.e., one game for confidentiality, one game for integrity, and so on), we give a concrete instance of an idealized program that exhibits all these properties at once. While UC is broadly adopted in cryptography, it has yet to gain traction elsewhere in software engineering and in distributed systems. The aim of this course is to explore the connections between UC in cryptography versus in other domains like fault tolerant systems, and to see what UC can offer to software engineers concerned with implementing large systems and not just modelling small primitives. Prerequisites: Cryptography (ECE/CS 407, CS/ECE 507 / CS/ECE 598 DK); Computer Security (ECE 422 or ECE 563). It is not necessary to have background knowledge of Ideal Functionalities and UC. However, some familiarity with cryptography and some mathematical maturity is expected, such as experience writing traditional game-based cryptography proofs. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
34018	Online Lecture	HRO	2:00PM -3:20PM	TR	n.a.	Driggs-Campbell, K	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Human Robot Interaction Section Info: This course focuses on the mathematical and algorithmic tools that allow us to design and control robots that interact with people and gives an overview of what is required for guaranteeing safety in interactive settings on physical systems. Topics include advanced robotics, levels of autonomy, decision making and control, artificial intelligence, human-in-the-loop control, and human-robot interaction. Students will practice essential research skills including critiquing papers, debating, reviewing, writing project proposals, and presenting ideas effectively. Prerequisites: ECE 470 or ABE 424 or ECE 484; ECE 448 / CS 440. Familiarity with decision-making, controls, and optimization is recommended, but not required. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
44042	Lecture	IS	9:30AM -10:50AM	TR	3026 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Shomorony, I	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Fund. Limits in Data Science Section Info: Fundamental Limits in Data Science. This course will expose students to the probabilistic modeling of several data science problems and to the characterization of fundamental performance limits (e.g., sampling complexity and information-theoretic feasibility). Students will learn techniques from information theory, statistics, graph theory, and random matrix theory through a combination of standard lectures and reading research papers. We will focus on applications in three broad classes of data science problems: clustering, sequence reconstruction and dimensionality reduction. The mathematical models studied will be motivated by specific practical data science problems, particularly from the field of genomics and computational biology. Examples include genome sequencing and assembly, DNA-based storage, haplotype phasing, and sequence alignment. Prerequisites: ECE 534. ECE 563 or at least some prior exposure to information theory thinking is recommended. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
50284	Lecture	KDC	2:00PM -3:20PM	TR	2017 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Driggs-Campbell, K	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Human Robot Interaction Section Info: This course focuses on the mathematical and algorithmic tools that allow us to design and control robots that interact with people and gives an overview of what is required for guaranteeing safety in interactive settings on physical systems. Topics include advanced robotics, levels of autonomy, decision making and control, artificial intelligence, human-in-the-loop control, and human-robot interaction. Students will practice essential research skills including critiquing papers, debating, reviewing, writing project proposals, and presenting ideas effectively. Prerequisites: ECE 470 or ABE 424 or ECE 484; ECE 448 / CS 440. Familiarity with decision-making, controls, and optimization is recommended, but not required. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
45422	Lecture	LV	11:00AM -12:20PM	TR	1015 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Varshney, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Generative AI Models Section Info: Generative models are widely used in many branches of artificial intelligence. This course covers mathematical and computational foundations of generative modeling, as well as applications in engineering, design, science, and the arts. Specific topics include variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, autoregressive models such as Transformers, normalizing flow models, information lattice learning, neural text decoding, prompt programming, and detection of generated content. Explainability and social responsibility in generative modeling will also be discussed, including topics of justice, human autonomy, and safety. Prerequisite: ECE 544 Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
70827	Lecture	PD	2:00PM -3:20PM	TR	3015 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Dragic, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Fiber Photonics Section Info: This course will not focus on the transmission of signals, as in telecommunications systems, but rather on harnessing the light-matter interactions that enable the generation, manipulation, and control of light with fiber. Topics range from mode theory, propagation, and fiber design, to fiber-based sensors and high power fiber laser systems. Prerequisites: Credit or concurrent enrollment in ECE 520, plus one of ECE 455 or 495 or ECE 572 or equivalent.
49792	Lecture	PV	12:30PM -1:50PM	TR	2017 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Viswanath, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Principles of Blockchains Section Info: Principles of Blockchains. Blockchains are decentralized digital trust engines and are a potential replacement to "digital platforms" that we encounter in today's world. Digital platform companies occupy seven of the largest companies in the world based on market capitalization (eg: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Facebook). Blockchains came into prominence through Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, introduced in 2009. In the decade since its inception, blockchain designs have evolved significantly, although the corresponding evolution of applications (beyond cryptocurrencies) have not caught up yet. In this course, we study a full-stack design of blockchains: we view the blockchains as a whole integrated system involving networking, incentives, consensus, application layer support. The course is structured into two parts: in the first part (5 weeks) we study the Bitcoin design in detail. Although very secure and remarkably incentive compatible in the real world, Bitcoin has very poor performance in many ways: throughput, latency, energy, compute, storage and communication. In the second part (8 weeks) we study the various efforts to scale the performance of Bitcoin in all the different dimensions, while maintaining the incentive compatibility and security of Bitcoin. In the spirit of Nakamoto (who implemented and tested the Bitcoin client before writing the white paper), this course will be implementation-heavy. We will use the Rust programming language for our assignments and projects. By the middle of the course, students will implement a bitcoin client in Rust and test it out internally. In the final project, students will implement features for scaling the Bitcoin client developed earlier. The homework assignments will help students in these implementation efforts by building up the requisite skillset. Example: the first assignment concerns providing students familiarity with Rust and the second assignment allows students to build and use basic crypto primitives (hash functions, Merkle trees, signatures) in Rust. In the project during the second part of the course, students will select one of the scaling solutions, which will be discussed, and implemented on top of the previously developed Bitcoin client and verify the resulting improvement. Prerequisites: Probability (ECE 313), programming in Python/C++, algorithms (CS 374) and networking (ECE/CS 438) Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
48773	Lecture	ZP	3:30PM -4:50PM	TR	2015 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg	Peng, Z	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/18/22-05/04/22 Credit: 4 hours Section Title: Wave Physics in Wireless Comm Section Info: Wave Physics in Wireless Communication. Prerequisite: ECE 520 or consent of instructor Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.