COMS W4733

There is average workload. You have 5 coding projects and 2 exams. The exams test you on your thinking ability as well as the class slides. Overall a good course.

I took the class in Fall 2018. While professor Allen does follow the slides most of the times, he will always give some additional information with it. If you ask him any doubts he is always able to clear those. His course is well organized with pre-determined readings. The labs are interesting if you are a noob to ROS and Robotics, and covered a diverse range of topics. You get to code Path Planning and basic computer vision etc. It is an interesting course for a beginner. He also spends some lectures to get you started with ROS and OpenCV. I enjoyed this course a lot.

5 Homeworks (50% of grade) 2 Non-Cumulative Midterms (20% of grade and 30% of grade)

Peter Allen is definitely a smart dude. Half of the robotics material published by Columbia was written by him. However, this dude cannot teach a class because he just doesn't care. He is extremely condescending and sarcastic and treats students as if they are below him. On Piazza, one student asked a simple question regarding the grading of the exam and he responds "Have you even seen your grading yet..I think not!" Class is spent by going over videos of robots, dissections and reading through the slides in class verbatim. It's not too big of a minus since I feel like most of the professors at Columbia do the same, however his slides are unnecessarily long and are packed with irrelevant information. The midterm is easy (avg. ~75-80) as he was obviously too lazy to change the questions from his sample midterm (that he only hands out in class), but the second midterm goes so in-depth in material you once thought was irrelevant the average turned out to be 30 points lower (avg. ~55-60). He also was too lazy to give out a sheet containing answers to the "practice" midterm, which was nothing like the second midterm. In other words, the exams are highly unpredictable so try to memorize every single thing you see on the slides. The homeworks require you to use the ROS software which is actually quite glitchy and can get frustrating at times. There is not a lot of guidance for these…

Heavy, even if you’re comfortable with Python and linux.

5th year CE major here. The assignments are very interesting, but LONG and often frustrating. Easily one of the most time-consuming courses I’ve taken. The course no longer deals with programming real robots (thank god), so it's all simulation. MAC USERS BEWARE: You will need to purchase the Parallels software (about $40) in order to run the Linux VM for ROS; Virtual Box is not nearly powerful enough to handle the simulation. The lectures do not help at all with the homework (its basically sink or swim with learning ROS and RViz), but the lecture material is what you will be tested on. I have to say, I’ve never had a professor who was as mean-spirited and condescending as Peter Allen. I don’t know why he is such a negative man; my only guess is that he is in the middle of a nasty divorce. He doesn’t care about the students, and has displayed astonishingly little concern for whether or not they succeed. He actively discourages questions by mocking or snapping at the asker. He trash-talks the TAs when they're not in the room. I want to like this class, but Allen's attitude really detracts from it; if he were a little bit more pleasant and helpful, it would make the class worlds better.

Professor Allen is a terrible professor and an all around bad human being. He is uninterested in teaching, uncaring about students, and unpleasant to interact with. If you take any class with him you will learn very little and regret every second of it.