Harvard Extension School

I have taught a couple classes at Harvard Extension School (HES). One, CSCIE-5, I co-taught with Kathleen Ryall for several years in the Spring. That class is currently on hiatus. The second class, CSCIE-282, I created, along with my co-instructors, in the Fall of 2005.

CSCIE-5: Introduction to Applied Computer Science

CSCI E-5 is a general education computer science course created by my current boss at MERL, Joseph Marks, along with Bill Freemen and Henry Lietner. The ideas for the course are spelled out in a paper. The basic idea was to allow non-CS majors access to the research topics in computer science. Most introductory computer science courses are programming courses: assuming that the students are destined for a computer science major and thus require the tools to understand the concepts deeply.

While teaching this course, I took the approach that it was my duty to create informed voters. If my students were to read an article about the use of face recognition in public spaces, I hoped that after the class they'd be able to ask the right questions. And that they'd have a sound understanding of the technologies shaping the future of our society that might prepare them to write that letter to their senator, or to head off to the polls.

The class was taken by both undergraduate and graduate students.

CSCIE-282: Statistical Techniques for Audio and Video Processing

CSCI E-282 is a more traditional course and so far has been taken by graduate students in the Master's of Information Technology program.

I co-founded this course with Bhiksha Raj and Paris Smaragdis. The course covers basic signal processing theory and practice in a multimedia environment. I specifically taught the video processing facet of the course, covering human visual perception, image formation, image filtering, feature detection and tracking, and image transforms. The image side of the course`focused on building the basic understanding and competence to build an image stitching program. The class was set up as a project class, with problem sets of increasing complexity culminating in a large independent project at the end of the class.

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