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Behrooz Parhami: 2007/06/19 || E-mail: parhami@ece.ucsb.edu || Problems: webadmin@ece.ucsb.edu Other contact info at: Bottom of this page || Go up to: B. Parhami's teaching and textbooks or his home page
On June 19, 2007, Professor Parhami's UCSB ECE website moved to a new location. For an up-to-date version of this page, visit it at the new address: http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/teaching_phil.htm
Professor Parhami believes in
detailed
advance planning for every course that he teaches. A typical course outline that
he hands out at the start of an academic term contains lecture schedule
(including page numbers in the text or reader), distribution and due dates for
all homework assignments, and a full description of course reference material
and grading scheme. He also strives for careful preparation before each lecture,
providing alternate explanations (e.g., through analogies), emphasizing the big
picture, and encouraging discussions/comments in class. Professor Parhami is a
demanding, but enthusiastic, teacher who has consistently received high marks
from students at all levels. These include graduate and undergraduate students
that he normally teaches, as well as a multitude of other learners, from high-school students to professionals in short courses and
seminars. Even though Professor Parhami’s focus in undergraduate teaching
has been computer design and architecture, he has also taught courses in
computer software, applications, and theory. At the undergraduate level and
below, Professor Parhami de-emphasizes pedestrian details (e.g., the instruction set
of a given microprocessor or the design details of a particular high-performance
computer) in favor of content that will be remembered and will remain useful
many years later. To this end, he makes extensive use of analogies,
back-of-the-envelope estimation, and class assignments that are both relevant
and interesting. He tries to avoid reusing exam or homework problems, not just
to make cheating more difficult but because he considers the process of making
up interesting problems germane to remaining excited about the topic and in
touch with the students. At the graduate level,
Professor Parhami emphasizes unifying
concepts and the presentation of a broad and balanced overview of the subject
matter. This philosophy is particularly important in the area of parallel
processing (ECE 254B, that he teaches regularly) where a multitude of competing
architectures must be presented and usefully compared through a fog of
misleading or unfair claims by their designers and proponents. He incorporates
the latest papers from journals and conference proceedings into the course
material. Nothing excites students more than the opportunity to discuss and
comment on a paper that was published only a few months ago. He updates the
course material (including its reader or text) with every offering. Professor Parhami
encourages original thinking to the extent that several term papers written for
his graduate courses have been published as journal or conference papers.
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