First meeting of my Undergraduate Business Intelligence Course

Yesterday, Monday, Jan. 30, 2012 was the first meeting of my ISYS 4293, Business Intelligence class at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. 


Our BI course is focused on Data Mining and we use Daniel Larose's book, Discovering Knowledge in Data (2005). Here are my course syllabus and schedule.


Here are my PowerPoint Slides for the first class.  I had asked students to read a piece of news related to DM on KDnuggets.com or other websites and share it with the class. I had also asked the class to review previous year's KDD Cup and choose a data set to work on during the class. The class was pretty excited. They had read the news and had researched the KDD Cup.They, however, know little about DM and thus some of the evaluations measures such as AUC and RMSE became confusing. We covered the basics, CRISP-DM, and DM tasks, discussed the 5 case studies in the book and as I walked around the class we discussed some of the KDD Cup data sets. 


I am excited, tonight working on Assignment 2 for the class, would want the first assignment covers all the details the class needs to learn from Chapter 2.

First semester as an ISYS Visiting Assistant Professor

Hello World!

I just finished my first semester as a visiting faculty member in the ISYS department at the University of Arkansas. The semester went by so quickly. My appointment started on Aug. 15 and here I am around four months later feeling like it's been only a few weeks since I started my job. I love teaching therefore it has been a gratifying experience to start my teaching here, which has one the higher-ranking Information Systems departments. I was teaching VB.NET programming to 30 undergraduate students and BI to 17 professional master's student. 

Teaching the Master's level class in a blended format was challenging. Keeping students engaged in class-related activities and tasks requires devising a very well-defined plan and directing students based upon it. The plan I had created was based on my limited understanding of how blended course are offered and it was bound to have numerous flaws.  I, however, benefited much from the advice and support I received from Dr. David Douglas. Likewise for my undergraduate class, I benefited much from advice, experience, and course material shared with me by George Loring. I also learned from Susan, Paul, and Jeff, who all shared with me some of their course-material, data files, and several useful teaching tips. Thanks everyone!

Today, December 12, 2011, I launch my professional blog titled Information System Notes. My hope is to actively write on my research and teaching interests which at this point are HCI and BI.

Please see the picture we took last week in our VB.NET class: