Hello! I hope that you are having a good summer. This email is to tell you about some course numbering changes that are about to take place. These changes are mostly related to a major reorganization of our offerings in the general area of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. We hope as a result of these changes our course offerings are expanded, the prerequisite structure is more sane, and some prior confusion and duplications in offerings is eliminated. Here is the short version of the actual changes taking place for this Fall: - Three courses currently offered for Fall as CS5914 are changing to their permanent numbers. These are CS5614 Natural Language Processing taught by Dr. Wang; CS5864 Learning-based Computer Vision taught by Dr. Thomas, and CS5784 Software Project Management taught by Dr. Kennedy. (OK, that last is not AI or ML, but it is a newly permanent course.) - The sections of CS5525 Data Analytics I taught by Drs. Jafari and Skarzynski will be replaced by CS5805 Machine Learning I. - CS5824 Advanced Machine learning taught by Dr. Eldardiry will be replaced by CS5806 Machine Learning II. Students in these sections will automatically be moved to the newly numbered sections (in some cases, even the CRNs will stay the same). Most people won’t need to do anything. Here is the fine print involved. - Going forward, CS5805 Machine Learning I will be the prereq for CS5806 Machine Learning II, CS5814 Deep Learning, CS5614 NLP, and CS5864 Learning-based Computer Vision. - If you are currently scheduled for Dr. Eldardiry’s section of CS5824, you should only take the new 5806 if you have had some ML course in the past (senior level is fine). If you have no ML background, then you should take CS5805 Machine Learning I instead, and take CS5806 in the future if you want (or any of the other courses listed above that CS5805 is the prereq for). - CS5525 and CS5526 are going away. STAT might continue to teach both in some form, we don’t particularly recommend that you take STAT/CS5525 from them. - We do not recommend that you take ECE5424 (currently cross-listed as CS5824). Take CS5806 instead. - Until now, CS6524 Deep Learning was cross-listed with an ECE course. CS6524 is going away. We do not recommend that you take the ECE version, but instead take CS5814. - Students may not get credit for both CS5525 and CS5805. - Students may not get credit for both CS5824 and CS5806. Students currently enrolled in one of the sections of CS5824 taught by ECE this Spring will be dis-enrolled from those sections, since they are going away. You can request to be added to CS5806 taught by Dr. Eldardiry instead, you will be given priority for a slot. Or you can ask ECE to let you into the equivalent section of ECE5424. They might or might not have room. Finally, if you have already taken any of these courses (such as the now deprecated CS5525 or CS5824), that is completely fine. They continue to count toward your degree or certificate. So long as you don’t try to get credit for both the old version and the new version of a course, everything should count for you. If for some reason you need to take the ECE or STAT version of a course, we will likely be able to count that on your plan of study. But you will need to check with us about the details. -- Dr. Cliff Shaffer Professor and Associate Department Head for Graduate Studies Department of Computer Science Phone: (540) 231-4354 Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061 WWW: www.cs.vt.edu/~shaffer