CDS 270: Information for Lecturers

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This page is intended for use by people giving lectures in CDS 270-2, Networked Control Systems. It contains information on what is expected for each set of lectures and directions for how to use the wiki to document your lectures.

Course Module

A course module consists of 3 lectures given over the course of a week. Each module consists of the following materials:

• A set of three lectures in powerpoint (or PDF) format that could be posted on the web
• A wiki page for each lecture summarizing the material and including references to related work
• A 10-20 page "chapter" that would be part of the "textbook" for the class
• Some optional homework exercises that interested students could undertake

When appropriate, the third lecture should be an "application" lecture in which the use of the concepts is described in the context of one of the course testbeds (Alice or RoboFlag). This is especially important in the first few weeks of the course, when the basic ideas and challenges are being introduced.

Wiki Page

For each lecture, a wiki page should be set up that documents the material presented in the lecture. The title of the wiki page should be of the form "NCS: <topic>", where <topic> is a short phrase describing the topic of the lecture (eg, Receding Horizon Control). Each lecture page should contain the following information:

• An abstract summarizing what the lecture is about and including key terms so that the pages can be located using the wiki search engine.
• A copy of the lecture presentation, in PDF format. These should be posted no later than the evening in which the lecture is given.
• A copy of the notes for the lecture, in PDF format. Homework exercises should be included in the notes. (This can be omitted if the material is very standard and an online set of notes is already available.)
• A reading list for the lecture. This will typically be 3-5 articles or book chapters that are particularly relevant to the material being presented. The reading list should be annotated to explain how the articles fit into the topic for the lecture.
• Links to additional information. If there are good sources of additional information for students interested in exploring this topic further, these should go at the bottom of the page.

An example of this type of page is the NCS: Introduction lecture page.

To create wiki page for a lecture, you can use the CDS 270-2 lecture template. The easiest way to do this is to follow these steps:

1. On the CDS 270-2 Main Page, go to the course schedule and edit the table.
2. Create a new link in the last column for the lecture you will be giving, with the text "[[NCS: <topic>]]" and save the page.
3. This will create a link to your new page (which should be in red unless that page already exists). Click on that link.
4. In the editing box for the page, enter the following text

   {{subst:CDS 270-2 Lecture}}

   and save the page. This will insert the lecture template that has all of the right sections in it.

5. Edit the page and fill in the sections as described in the comments

Application Lectures

For lectures that are focused on one of the course applications (Alice and RoboFlag), the same instructions should be used for creating a wiki page, except that the page name should be of the form [[Alice: <topic>]] or [[RoboFlag: <topic>]]. The intent of using a different page naming convention is two fold: (1) allowing the style of these pages to be different than the standard NCS lecture and (2) allowing possible use of these pages for different courses that are not linked to CDS 270-2.