Current Courses at UMass Lowell:
- COMP 4610: GUI Programming I
GUI Programming I is the first course in a two-semester CS project course sequence. Its focus is on creating web pages that take advantage of the many new features of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and jQuery and that exploit the capabilities that these technologies make available.
Courses Taught at Oakland University:
- CIT 350: Human-computer Interaction
I redesigned the lecture materials to introduce students with the latest technology and concepts in the young fast-growing domain of human computer interaction. These lecture materials represent the comprehensive materials from several textbooks, latest published paper in ACM CHI, and my personal research thoughts. I would pause the lecture couple times to integrate quiz questions and keep the students' learning active. Students found that the occasional quizzes kept (them) on track and engaged. Students also enjoyed the group work and in class activities that I designed for every class to connect the course materials with real life examples. I have designed independent homework at the beginning of the semester for students to get up to speed with the basic concepts of HCI. In the later 2/3 portion of the class, students start a group project, which is broken down into manageable chunks, and I provide constant feedback to students regarding their progress.
- CIT 252: Interactive Web Systems
I improved this course with new textbook and new lecture materials. This course introduces the fundamentals of interactive multimedia in context of web technologies. Topics covered include use of modern web development tools, Markup Languages, server-side processing, and client-side processing using languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, AJAX, and jQuery. Students will use these tools to create interactive and dynamic web sites. Satisfies the university general education requirement in the knowledge applications integration area.
- CSE 495/595: Computational Methods for Biomedical Data
I developed a new senior/graduate level course on Computational Methods for Biomedical Data. With the rapid growth of Data Science and Biomedical Research, the course provides the students an introductory framework for various computational methods required in scientific and biomedical data analysis. The course introduces many of today's major research methods for exploring data such as statistical concepts, spectral and time-frequency analysis, objective analysis, and Baysian Methods. The goal is to extract meaningful trends and information from large data sets arising from STEM applications as diverse as imaging and biomedical sciences.
- CIT 350: Human-computer Interaction
I redesigned the lecture materials to introduce students with the latest technology and concepts in the young fast-growing domain of human computer interaction. These lecture materials represent the comprehensive materials from several textbooks, latest published paper in ACM CHI, and my personal research thoughts. I would pause the lecture couple times to integrate quiz questions and keep the students' learning active. Students found that "the occasional quizzes kept (them) on track and engaged". Students also "enjoyed the group work and in class activities" that I designed for every class to connect the course materials with real life examples. I have designed independent homework at the beginning of the semester for students to get up to speed with the basic concepts of HCI. In the later 2/3 portion of the class, students start a group project, which is broken down into manageable chunks, and I provide constant feedback to students regarding their progress.
- CSE/CIT 280: Sophomore Project
This is a team-oriented project work consisting of a small project to build skills in needs assessment, group problem solving, and written and oral technical presentations. In order to help the students to succeed in this class, students learn to conduct effective team-work by writing proposals, creating and updating their timeline for time management, and learning to judge their own work with team evaluations.
- CSE 791 Research Initiation
- CSE 792 Research Seminar
I have restructured these two courses for students to experience a prototyped mini-Ph.D. process in one semester: search the literature and read grant-proposals; define significant scientific problems; write thesis proposals to compete for limited "funding"; implement successful proposals; submit final "mini thesis" and present to the public for their "mini thesis defense". I find this to be the most effective way to introduce new Ph.D. students to the concept of doing research, getting published, and defending their thesis. The responses from the students for this change were very positive. One student commented, "In comparison to other years, (Prof. Zhou) took ownership and made this class extraordinary".
- CSE/CIT 496/596 Internship and Professional Practice
This course gives the students real-world practice experience through internship in the industry. The students work on a specific project at a corporate site with the prior approval by the instructor. Students receive guidance on their project throughout the course. Oral and written presentations about the project are required.
Courses Under Development:
- Multidisciplinary Visualization and Modeling
The course discusses topics in computer graphics, modeling and visualization techniques used to solve scientific problems. Students will learn how to do collaborative and multidisciplinary work with scientists outside computer science, define the computer science contribution, and do critical thinking through a semester-long research project.
- Advanced Human Computer Interaction
The course introduces fundamental concepts in human computer interaction and discusses current research advancements in HCI. Topics include principles of human perception and cognition, principles of effective visual and information design, and techniques for prototyping and evaluation. Students will learn to design, implement, and evaluate computer interfaces that are accessible and effective for real users.
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Previous Teaching Experience:
In the fall of 2010, I had the opportunity to serve as graduate teaching assistant for Interdisciplinary Scientific Visualization in the department of computer science at Brown University. I gained knowledge of developing course syllabus, planning course schedules, picking inspiring reading materials, advise students on defining valuable research projects that are doable within a semester. The course website can be found here.
In this course, students learned how to do interdisciplinary scientific visualization research, from soup to nuts. Projects involved the solution of scientific problems using computer graphics, modeling, and visualization. Working in small groups, students identified scientific problems, propose solutions involving computational modeling and visualization, evaluate the proposals, design and implement the solutions, apply them to the problems, evaluate their success, and report on results. Examples include interactive software systems, immersive CAVE applications, quantitative analysis tools, or new applications of existing visualizations methods. The following are some snapshots from the class final-project abstracts/presentations.
Steve: Interactive Maps for Functional Brain Connectivity Queries
Modeling Human Performance from Visualization Interaction Histories, IEEE InfoVis (Poster session), Honorable Mention, 2011, Steven R. Gomez and David H. Laidlaw
Ryan: Visualization of Hyperspectral Images Through Interactive Non-linear Sectionals
Andy and Tyler: Multimodal Volume Visualization of Geophysical Data for Archaeological Analysis
Justin and Sam: Statistical Assessment of Individual Peak Quantitation in Mass Spectrometric Data
Gideon and Diem: Do explanations promote confidence in uncertainty visualizations? A user-study in medical diagnosis
