Name: Daniel Mirota
Year: 4th year Graduate Student
Hometown: Flemington, NJ
Major: Ph.D. in Computer Science, focus in medical applications of Computer Vision
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By now, many folks around campus may have noticed the film crew that was on campus in the first week of November. They were filming for The Social Network the upcoming film about the start of facebook. The film crew being around reminded me of the course I taught with Carol Reiley, “Computer Vision Application for Online Social Networks” or informally facebook 101. I wouldn’t doubt most of the readings of this blog have a facebook account.
It was my first time teaching, aside from being a TA. Carol and I worked tirelessly to complete the design of the course and write the curriculum. We even stayed on campus through New Years to have the course ready for intersession.
When intersession started, we had ~150 slides for the first week of class. With this many slides we though the slides would last to entire week. However, we used them all in the first day and found that we needed to quickly work to keep up with the class.
Our class was the first time, to our knowledge, a facebook computer vision application course was taught at Hopkins. Teaching a class so fresh and current I found very exciting. As Carol and I researched the different features of facebook we discovered many interesting parts of the facebook API and what possibilities were available for Adobe Flash and other multimedia application.
By the end of the course Carol and I were both very impressed by all of the student projects. We presented a tough course covering a broad range of topics from a brief history of facebook, to basic computer vision methods and developing in a web framework. All of our students did a wonderful job.
Overall, while taxing at times and requiring some late nights, teaching the course was very rewarding. Hopkins gave us a great environment to teach in. Carol and I also thank the Digital Media Center (DMC) for finding our curriculum an innovative use of technology and granting us funds to purchase webcams and wii-motes. Both of which are available for student projects at the DMC. So take advantage of the DMC anytime you can. They have many resources for all of your media needs. As well as people there to help with their service and don’t forget the game room.
It was excellent teaching the course. I received a real appreciation of what it takes to build a course from just an idea to making the course successful for all of my students. This level of experience I personally feel is only available from teaching an entire course. While my experience TA was also satisfying, it was simply not the same.
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