Angelos Keromytis

I know he has some bad reviews here, surprising, but I felt compared to lot of other lecturers, he was funny, entertaining and engaging. He seemed keen and interested and in love with the various aspects of security. Also felt his research shone through his lectures as well as his breadth of knowledge in different aspects of networking (like knowledge of SIP) and security. I felt the course was interesting in a whole, covers crypto, javascript attacks, firewalls, SPAM analysis etc. I felt though there could have been more emphasis on OS attacks, overflows especially since the Prof. Angelos was the lecturer for Operating systems too. In terms of languages C/C++ was the main choice for the first couple of assignments, then there was some javascript and then some shell scripts for firewall and spam analysis (AWK scripts etc.). The TA (Georgios Kontaxis) was very sharp too, and had super fast response time to emails even at the most odd hours of the night. Good on him. I would rate this class 5/5 and the professor 5/5. I would also think its a great elective to take even if you are working on some other major. I think you would get a great overview of different aspects of security, and I think this is probably better than lot of other courses, in terms of interesting assignments and great lecturer. I thought the mid-term and final were decent, the final being slightly harder (its…

I'll be blunt: Angelos Keromytis is not a good instructor. He might be pretty smart and know his stuff, but he just has no idea how to be a professor (sometimes literally; there was a period of 5 or 6 classes where I didn't see him at all and the TAs taught both the lab and lecture classes). A good professor spends time crafting detailed but concise slides with concrete, succinct examples; Keromytis copies code off the web and pastes them into his slides as if they were his own. (Seriously, Google the code. You'll find the exact same contrived examples online that only seldom work; most of the time they'll only serve as basic skeletons of what you need to do to get your code to compile.) A good professor is welcoming and encourages student participation and questions; Keromytis is intimidating and sometimes even humiliates students. For example, about 3/4ths of the way through the course, when a student wasn't sure how to change permissions on a file, instead of replying something reproaching but nevertheless sane such as, "Use the chmod command, as we've been doing for the past two months," Keromytis responded, "Are you kidding? You're kidding, right?" This is not a good way to encourage students to keep asking questions. As if asking questions helped most of the time (see next paragraph). A good professor teaches and presents students concepts and ideas; Keromytis' ego comes…

There's a CULPA review of Dan Rubenstein in which the reviewer compares him to a sushi chef who just hands you a dead fish and then criticizes your cooking skills. Keromytis is much worse than that. He's more like a swimming teacher who throws you into a huge pool of acid, then just randomly rambles on about the Summer Olympics. In his lectures, he was always talking about new concepts without introducing them first. Example: one day he was talking about page faults, as if everyone knew what a page fault was. But he had never talked about page faults or pages in class before. I raised my hand and asked "What's a page fault?" He said, "Oh, that's right, I haven't talked about pages yet. I meant to say 'TLB miss', not 'page fault' ". OK, fair enough. But then, a few minutes later, he used the term "page fault" again. He STILL hadn't introduced the concept of pages. You need to be aware of what you're saying... Don't assume we know these things, we don't all have like 8 million PhD degrees in CS like you. It's a CLASS. We're there to LEARN. That means most of us didn't know anything about this crap at the beginning of the semester. Keromytis is one of the many professors at Columbia whose teaching skills were NOT taken into consideration at all when Columbia decided to hire him. If Columbia decided jobs based on teaching skills, Angelos would be fired tomorrow. Basically, he got…

In defense of a wonderful professor: Prof. Keromytis is bright, extremely knowledgeable, prepared for class, funny (not dull), and cares about his students. My friends and I found him to be very approachable (not snotty or blatantly rude) and eager to help, though often it made sense to first go to the TA. His assignments covered some applied security technologies (SSL, RSA/AES encryption, SOCKS, DH key exchange, etc.) but not necessarily every single theoretical model discussed in class. C was the language of choice with two minor exceptions for Java. I rate this class 5/5.

I would not be writing this review if not for the spectacularly bad experience I had taking Prof. Keromytis class. I found his lectures unispired and generally incoherent. For a programming course I find it important to be given examples but his lecture slides were what seems like incomplete ideas carelessly put together so that there would be a semblance of a lecture note. I later found out most of the slides were taken straight off of books, other websites, man pages, etc. As a matter of fact the only good lectures were those where we had guest lecturers. He tended to be somewhat condescending in reponse to questions and requests and I got the impression that he was intentionally misinterpreting the question to make you dumb when in fact that was not the question at all. His labs and homeworks were generally repetitive and again uninspiring. Many of the labs and homeworks were repetitions of one another or just annoyingly tedious...sort of like asking someone to do long division to the 100th decimals. Overall, the worst CS class I've ever taken in my life.

I liked Angelos. He seems intimidating at first (if you judge him by his mugshot on the columbia site), but he's really very friendly and takes time to explain things again if you didn't catch it the first time, and seems to enjoy teaching this class. Consider this class CS bootcamp, though. If you're not completely comfortable with C and the linux kernel, the assignments will kick your ass. They took up all my free time, essentially, but somehow I enjoyed it. I found the midterm to be much easier than I expected, but the final test was pretty brutal. All in all, I would highly recommend taking this course and this professor.

The lectures are straight from the book - the prof reads right off the pages. This *sucks* big time coz the assignments are harder and you get *no idea* from the lectures. (Example. You need to do this RSA encryption project. You get the math background from a book somewhere. But to actually *implement* it using those hideous Java BigNums or the grungy GnuMP libs is a whole other story - try computing an inverse mod using GnuMP...) You get little-to-no-help from the prof for debugging etc. The exams are not particularly hard, basically regurg the stuff you saw in class. Overall, if you did the programming then you got something, otherwise don't take this class. Ok, maybe the prof really knows his stuff, but he sure doesn't know how to deliver it. Overall, potential to be a great class, but sucky prof. rating is ** out of five stars.

Heavy. 1 "lab" (i.e., homeworks) per week that takes on average 4-6 hours (extremes were around 8-10). 3 "homeworks" (i.e., longer projects) thoughout the semester. The first one was intense and took some time, but the following two felt like they could have been labs and were much shorter. Note however: you will be pressed for time throughout the course. You need to eat, sleep, and breathe Advanced Programming (especially if you take it concurrently with Data Structures--a poor choice, in my opinion. Both have heavy workloads). Whenever you have spare time, work on your lab and homework. Especially during weeks when homeworks are due, since these would often be due 2-3 days after a lab, in order to keep the labs on schedule. Midterm and final are both in the CLIC lab and are programming assignments. Midterm was doable (avg 68%) but final was difficult (avg 59%). It had two parts, one in C and one in PHP. The C part relied on one concept we learned for basically one lecture, and if this didn't work, the entire part wouldn't work. Protip for exams: when you reach bottlenecks like this, stop messing with it and spend your time wisely by coding other features, even though they may not be testable due to the aforementioned bottleneck. If your code is right, you'll at least get a few points for it.

Erm... some people formed a cult of personality around this guy, but I found him to be kind of lousy as an instructor and had a tough time maintaining any interest. A lot of questions would be answered in the form of a long, irrelevant story, which was annoying, and the exams were sort of harsh. Guest lecture from the VMWare guys was pretty cool. I did eventually warm to this class as the term went on, and doing some kernel hacking will make you feel warm inside, so... Plus it's not like you get a choice, really.

Like the other review says...Keromytis definitely know his security stuff...however, in his teaching approach, he assumes students know just about as much as he does. His lectures are interesting, however they do not correspond to the programming assignments at all. The assignments are a lot of work, and he just dumps it on you with no help whatsoever. He is somewhat snobby, and not at all approachable...but if you love security, and think you can handle programming it, than the class is for you.