Teaching

Processing massive data sets. 198:671 . Graduate Database Systems   CS541 , Graduate Algorithms CS513.

• My teaching philosophy. Technical writing (and sometimes research) is highly directional: you build up the lemmas into theorems, primitive operations into final algorithms or building blocks into a overall system, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of (under)graduate teaching is also done along the same lines, learning data structures first before sophisticated algorithms or learning relational algebra  before performance tuning of databases, or layers of  a IP network before network management which often cuts across layers, etc. My style in teaching elliptical, exposing the students to ideas from many different layers of the knowledge and have them grapple with the cumulative issues. I like flexible method of teaching that does not emphasize step-by-step development of their expertise, but inducing an overarching understanding that comes from being confronted by many ideas, some in collusion and some challenging.  
• Operational details. Each class includes stories, puzzles, few reading exercises, standard and non-standard homeworks.