Peter Allen

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.

Disclaimer: In the progression of my CS courses at Columbia, I was supposed to have taken this class two semesters ago, so when I started this course I had already taught myself/had experience with a lot of the data structures in the course curriculum, so my perspective of the material may be a little skewed. BUT WITH THAT SAID... I strongly disliked this course with Allen for two reasons: 1) A good chunk of the homework was focused on Java GUI's as opposed to actual data structures. There was minimal to no assistance in constructing these GUI's, which meant you had to spend large chunks of time scanning tedious API documentation to try to figure out how to do things, instead of spending time actually learning and implementing the data structures. Also, I found this frustrating because Java GUI's are increasingly becoming an antiquated form of user interface in industry, which spending the time to teach them to myself seem irrelevant. In my opinion, it would make a lot more sense to include extensive implementation of Java GUI's in W1007. 2) Professor Allen is actually condescending to students. There were numerous Piazza posts where students would ask questions that were fairly reasonable and his responses would be incredibly and unnecessarily snarky (i.e. Student: "Can we assume ___ about problem X?" Professor: "Can we assume gravity exists?"). In class, this attitude discou…

I've been both a student and ta in prof. allen's class. 1) He has a dry and cutting sense of humor, but certainly does not target or seek to silence students. It's more on the order of tough love. 2) The grading is fair. I've ta'd a number of classes where profs have some nebulous grading standard. Prof. Allen lays it out for the ta's: this is how it's to be done. period. I wasn't one of his best students, certainly, but improved with age. His is one of the most memorable classes and important classes I ever took. Perhaps, the best I took at columbia. This is why I specifically asked to ta for him. Be prepared to work. however, the more you put in, the more you'll take from it. (this goes for ta'ing for him as well).

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…

Great prof. Excellent course notes, straightforward assignments. He's on top of his TAs to get stuff back quickly. The downside to this is that they are VERY sloppy. I was docked a ton of points (that they never responded to emails, or in office hours to discuss) for stuff they got wrong. Allen is fabulous, though. Really great at explaining the concepts, and he brought in some awesome lecturers in robotics. Overall, this speaks to his wish to get his students excited about computer science. Note: He's really, really arrogant (and really, really accomplished, but that doesn't excuse it). I've seen him tear students apart when they ask him clarification questions on homework instructions. (thankfully the TAs used piazza, so you could, and thankfully I did, do this anonymously).

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.

Peter Allen is a really nice guy. He's more normal than most comp-sci profs, probably because he went to Brown and was an Econ major before he found his calling in CS. He's a little disorganized, and his PDF packets are kind of annoying, but at least they're all available on his site. Some of the assignments are needlessly a pain in the ass, but they do teach you the material in a more direct way than, say, for example: object-oriented programming with an awful PhD student. (Only take OOP with Kender.) I would stress that his lectures are not the most helpful thing in the world, but he is supportive and has a sense of humor, which is always nice. I recommend this class, but prepare to slog through terrible problem sets, especially the last one.

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.

First of all, the co-requisite of Discrete Math is not necessary in order to understand the materials in this class. In fact, we went over most of the graphs stuff in this class before Discrete Math. So don't worry about taking both classes at the same time, The class covers the basic data structures and the algorithms associated with them. Most of the codes are provided by the textbook, so you don't really have to memorize how to write them, but you do need to know how they work. Most of the questions on the test and the hw require you to apply an algorithm to a set of data and show their results. The materials covered are not too difficult, and as long as you can think abstractly and understand what you are trying to do, you'll be fine. Professor Allen is an excellent lecturer who presents the materials very clearly. He uses powerpoints for the lectures and every time we get to some code, he would stops and demonstrate how it worked on the blackboard. His lectures notes which he posts online are concise and super helpful. The lecture notes extract the things you need to know from the textbook without going into excessive details and get boring, as the textbook tends to do. In fact, I almost never had to use the book other than to do the assignment from the back of each chapter. You can get by on his notes alone without going to class or read the book, but I highly recommend…

The homeworks are relatively easy, the projects are "fun" (in that nerdy way that CS kids love), the classes are not really necessary to go to after the linear algebra sections have been covered, but the midterm and final are kind of bullshit. Allen only gives you a general overview of what might be on it, without a practice test, and the questions on it are weird; often testing cursory knowledge of subjects not covered in any assignment or project. It felt like the final was "trying" to be harder than the rest of the class just to achieve a nice grading curve. That said, here are the pros: You get to program for an actual, real-world machine, which is something you don't really get to do in many other classes. It's a different kind of debugging when you have to find out how slippery a certain floor is and factor that into your motion calculations to account for drift. You also get to use linear algebra in a very practical way, (It really cemented a lot of the fundamentals I had only weakly grasped after taking intro to Linear Algebra). Lastly, it also serves as an intro to Computer Vision as well, some of the later homework assignments require you to mount a camera on the robot and do image processing to solve certain puzzles. In summary, it's a class that kind of feels like an easy-A class despite having a respectable work-load (the projects) and arbitrarily difficult exams.…