Jonathan Voris

25 pages of reading or so for each class, listening and studying the lyrics of 5-8 songs per week, open book midterm and final that weren't difficult so long as you do the readings and pay attention, and a final project/paper (10-12 pages, or 7-8 pages and the production of a song of your own, which the TA will help you create.)

Easy midterm and final (Although Voris will be an ass during them so yay?) Assignments were unnecessary tedious, but the AI parts were easy

For any student that desires to have a more nuanced understanding of cultural relations through time in this country, this class is for you. Music has been one of the driving forces of cultural change since the early spirituals, but being able to understand the particularities of song & genre, and their relation to culture (past, present, and future) from a sociological perspective, is not an easy undertaking. This class has done a lot of the work for you, and then challenges you to do more. Trust me, take this class. I will agree with some of the previous reviewers that Dr. Rieder can be a bit abstract in his language during lectures. However, you will get used to this and begin to understand him (for the most part) if you do the readings and pay attention. Importantly, he's fun, passionate, and truly loves insights from students. He doesn't shoot people down, but rather offers counter arguments purely to force students to consider other perspectives. I was challenged often, and I'm now better for it. Is that not the point of academic inquiry. A side note: I asked a graduating sociology major what sociology courses they enjoyed most while at Columbia. They replied, "any class with Dr. Rieder." I say this to show that I'm not alone in my adoration for Dr. Rieder. Take this class, and enjoy it.

The rest of the reviews are pretty accurate about this class but I figured I should add in a bit to just explain Prof. Voris. Let me start by saying Prof. Voris is a terrible human being and might be one of the worst people I have ever met. He would often belittle students for asking questions related to class material or about class policies. His assignments were based off what we learned in class with the majority of the difficulty coming from the insane amount of fluff put on top of them. Like he gave us games to encode a solver for and I must have spent 1% of the time on the solving algorithm (the important part of the assignment relevant to the class) and 99% of the time dealing with the absurdly detailed rules of the game that had no reason to exist beside to waste our times. Now back to the real problem Voris. Every time a student asked him for something, like if he could post the blank midterm online after we got it back so we can study it for the final, he would answer in the most demeaning way ever. Every question he felt was a personal attack on himself. Now I am by no means a psych major, but I would say he had a huge fear of being seen as inferior. He would oftentimes go on rants about how in his college, which is some local school that most people have never heard of, he had it so much harder and how Columbia students were entitled and a bunch of cheaters. This r…

4 programming projects, the first one must be done is Lisp, the rest can be done in any language that supported by the clic machines(Actually only C/C++, Java, Python and Lisp are valid options) , 15% each. The projects were probably the most interesting part of the course, but they can be time consuming, so start early. 1 midterm(15%) and final(20%), both during the class period. You should have no problem if you understand the materials covered in class. 2 pop quizzes. It seems they were just to check attendance and had very limited impact on your final grade.

I have mixed feelings for this course. My final grade is satisfactory but I'm still quite disappointed with the course. AI is supposed to be a fun class, and there are plenty of interesting topics that can be covered in a semester long course. However, at the end of the semester, you would find what you had learned was just a bunch of search algorithms plus some machinery that helps you play with logic expressions. I think if Professor Voris had spent less time(or none at all) on giving pop quizzes, explaining the solutions to the pop quizzes and reiterating some of the petty uninteresting concepts, he would probably have had time to cover some more interesting and important topics such as reinforcement learning and applications of AI in robotics/vision/nlp, etc. But I gotta say this is the first time Professor Voris have taught the course and he did try to teach the course as best he could. He did not come across as a sloppy instructor, it's just that he needs to gain more experience in teaching.

4 Programming Projects: Incredibly unclear on the specifications, disorganized and time consuming. Unless you exclusively code in your free time you should get started sooner rather than later. Midterm: Incredibly simple material, incredibly confusing test. See above. Final: In class final. Still relatively easy on the material, but still confusing and above average in length. Test Averages: Mid 60's

Jonathan Voris was hands down the worst professor I've had in the Computer Science department (although I suppose I use the term 'professor' lightly here, because I believe he was a post-doc who was teaching Artificial Intelligence for the first time), and among the top 3 worst professors I've had at Columbia (which is surprising since he speaks perfect English). The Good: The first day, I was rather excited to be taking this course, because Artificial Intelligence is a subject of great interest to me, and I was pleased to find that Dr. Voris was very enthusiastic about the subject matter, and the first three introductory lectures, while sometimes rambling, were at least engaging. The Bad: Unfortunately it was all down hill from there: it became incredibly difficult to determine what information from lectures was relevant. As a result more than half of the class stopped attending lectures (Voris began giving pop quizzes in class around 3/4's of the way through the semester). The Ugly: Programming Assignments: The programming assignments were long. I mean incredibly long. The assignments consisted of single page pdf files describing a task in vague detail. There were no suggestions for completion strategies (fine, you don't get these in real life) but more frustratingly, there was absolutely no framework given. The projects often required large amounts of infrastructure (e.g. c…

Four assignments: Pattern Matcher in Common Lisp, Sokoban Search Algorithm, Battle of the Gomoku Agents (and tournament), and Inference Algorithms (entailment with forward and backward chaining). Midterm - fair. Final - too long. Two pop quizzes.

After reading the rather poor reviews of Professor Stolfo's AI course, I was excited to take the course with his postdoc. Unfortunately, he failed to meet expectations. Voris is a very nice guy, but was disorganized during his lectures. Also his command of Common Lisp wasn't the greatest, and used code from Stack Overflow in his slides. Thankfully, he only required Lisp for the first assignment. The assignments were a little much. I found that I was working on the implementation more than the actual search algorithms. I spent weeks working on the game implementation for Gomoku and Sokobon, while rushing through the search algorithms hours before the assignments were due. Also, he provides the easiest test cases possible, while using hard ones to grade. Most of my assignments assignments passed all of the test cases, but I ended up doing poorly on them because the test cases used for grading were not even remotely as easy as the examples he provided. The reviews from Stolfo's class mostly say that he skims over everything interesting in AI. Voris wasn't much different, and we actually covered less material than Stolfo usually does. We didn't even get to machine learning, and our last assignment was on logic, entailment via forward and backward chaining (which I thought was an extremely boring project that again, takes more time to write the implementation than the search algori…