ECS Honors Seminar Interest Survey

Please fill out the following survey to help us plan interesting seminars for you!

Seminar Topics Survey

Please rate your interest level in the following topics. Note: You can modify the "Topic" field if you have your own ideas.

Subject	Topic (you can specify your own)	Interest Level
		Least			Most
		1	2	3	4	5
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Graphics
Operating Systems
Networking
Security
Other

What is the purpose of the seminar?

ECS Honors would like to have a few seminars during the Spring 2008 semester. We will ask a UTD professor to speak to students and give an introduction to their field. The introduction would be geared toward providing motivated students insight into some of the concepts that can be used to solve interesting problems. We want to find subjects that students are interested in, but generally do not have access to until Senior year. We will also have a project that will be designed for students to tackle a concrete problem and apply the concept taught in the seminar. After we gauge the success of the first seminar we will consider asking an outside business person to speak at the end of the first day of the seminar about the given topic and how it relates to their business.

What is the plan for the seminar?

Our current outline for a seminar is to have a 2-day activity over the course of a weekend (probably Friday and Saturday). On the first day the professor will teach some topic from their field, with the goal of illustrating how a particular concept can be applied to solve a problem. For example, an Artificial Intelligence professor may show how Min-Max Trees can be used to solve Game Theory problems. At the end of the first day we will present a challenge or activity in the form of a fun project that could be completed individually or in teams. Students will be encouraged to think about the challenge and start working on the project that evening. On the second day we will meet again to continue working on the projects and help students with any problems until the projects are complete. If the project lends itself to competing, then we may have a friendly competition between teams. For example, with a challenge to make the best checkers-playing program, we may have teams square off in a checkers tournament.

Will there be food?

We would also like to serve food (or at least eat lunch together) each day of the seminar if we can find the means to.