Mailed on 5 February 2021.

Educational Newsletter

A collaboration between the study programme and W.S.G. Abacus

Edition: February 2021

This newsletter contains evaluations of the first quartile and news updates of the second quartile. With the cold weather coming up, you can stay warm inside and enjoy reading!
Anouk Beursgens, Officer Educational Affairs W.S.G. Abacus

The Corona-situation continues to prevail.  Of course, like you, we also hoped for a quick return to normalcy, where we could all interact face to face and not through computer screens.  Alas!  This delayed us a bit more than what we had hoped for to bring this newsletter. Nevertheless, you can read in it the short summary-reports about Module-01 and Module-05, where, among others, the module-teams inform how your feedback helps them to improve the module. 
Wishing you all a safe and healthy time,
Pranab Mandal, Programme Director AM

 

Obituary

With great sadness we inform you that Dr. Walter Kern passed away on January 29, 2021. Though he was seriously ill since the summer of 2020, his death was still unexpected. We know him as a passionate teacher who was always there for the students and colleagues alike.  We will miss him very much.

Drawing Tablets

At the beginning of December, the programme have sent a mail to every student of AM who follows AM courses with information and how to pick up a drawing tablet. If you did not receive this email, but think you are entitled to, you can contact the secretariat.

Information Sessions

Several information session were and will be organised. The programme organised an information session about the electives of module 11. Last week, an information session about the different specializations of the master AM was organised. The recording of this session and the recording of MDS can be found on the Abacloud - Standard Documents - Study information 2021.
The minor information lunch will take place coming Monday.

 

Module Evaluations

Module 1

Given the circumstances, the module team is very happy how the module went. The teacher of Linear Structures-I was really proud of the way she organized her course with interactive video materials, quizzes, etc.  Also, the teacher invoked a group of student assistants to support the students of the course.  Students appreciated this very much.  The teacher would like to thank the students for their positive feedback (with suggestions for improvements). As for the next year, the teacher would like to improve on the problem sets, in particular on giving individual feedback on writing math/proofs.

The Calculus teacher noticed that the recordings of the online lectures were helpful for the students, because they could access the material at any time and review according to their own schedule. However, she would have liked to see bigger attendance during the tutorials. The teacher suspects that it has to do with readily available solutions on the internet. She will spend some attention next year to emphasize the developing proper learning skills, which includes trying on their own instead of looking at the available solutions.
The teacher changed the exam duration from 3 hours to 2 hours and found it quite suitable for such a course.  She was happy that students liked the (difficulty) level of the test. 

The Matlab sessions within the project, faced unexpected problems due to corona.  The teacher recognizes the problem of forming a long queue of students to let their codes being checked by the student assistant for the correctness and online.  This problem was never there in other years when these sessions were physical sessions.  On the basis of last year’s complain, the teacher scheduled 6 Matlab sessions concentrated in 4 weeks.  This way students started with Matlab earlier than last year and also, the students had more time towards the end of the module.  Also, last year there were some complaints about unclear assessment rule for the project.  The teacher introduced this year an assessment rubric for the modelling project.  This worked well with the students. 

Both the students and the teachers found giving online tutorial sessions were not ideal.  All will prefer physical/on-campus tutorials.  All hope to have a better time next year, so that educational activities can be held on-campus.

Module 5

Overall, considering the time we are going through, the module went well.  In addition to the fact that Corona made us teaching most of the module online, there were quite a few other changes in the module this year.  Julio Backhoff took over as the lecturer for the course Mathematical Statistics. Hans Zwart gave the course Analysis-II.  A new component “Intercultural Communication” was brought in as part of the course “Prooflab revisited: diversity in Cultures”.  This new component was given by Tracy Craig and Tugce Akkaya. 

The total workload for the module was considered reasonable by the students.  Some students, though, seem to feel the workload for Anlaysis-II is higher than the workload necessary to complete Mathematical Statistics.  Though slight variations between different subjects will always be there, we believe that this perception is because of the nature of the two subjects.  Nevertheless, we shall try to bring in more connection between MS and Analysis, next year.  

As for the content/material for the course MS, we have made quite a few changes from last year.  These were also direct consequences of the feedback from last year.  First of all, the expectations from this course was properly explained at the beginning.  The exercises now combine both theoretical and computational questions.  With the latter parts, the statistical software R is more integrated with the course. To help the dissatisfaction with the reader for the course, we have brought in an additional reference book. Students liked it.  In the meantime, we have found an excellent student who is working on a revision of the reader and this will be ready in the next year. 

Unfortunately, the teacher Julio Backhoff is leaving the university. So, we will have a new teacher taking over the course, with whom all these feedback will be discussed. 

Another comment from the students was about the unbalanced workload within the module where a peak occurs towards the end of the module, when Statistics projects, and Prooflab presentations all have deadline.  We shall definitely work on the schedule of the next year to spread out the workload throughout the module.

 

New lecturers

Maria Vlasiou

I’ve been asked by Abacus to write a short piece introducing myself for a while now. I postponed this task way beyond its extended deadline as the lockdown (and resulting home-schooling) has made my schedule impossible. Having seen the examples online, the task is simple enough. I only have to copy my short bio of 200 words or so (I’ll do so in a second, I promise), but an introduction to me would not be a truthful piece of text if it wasn’t just a touch of this side of wordy. So there you go, introduction key takeaway #1: Maria likes to talk to people, be it over the different ways to harvest tea or thoughts of their future career steps. As promised, a bit of more standard introduction to me is as follows:

Maria Vlasiou is a Full Professor at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, an Associate Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), a Research Fellow of the European research institute EURANDOM, and the current chair of the Dutch women in mathematics network. Her research centres on the performance of stochastic processing networks with layered architectures. She currently runs three NWO projects on the topic, focusing on energy networks, high-tech manufacturing, and stochastic interacting networks, and an additional project from the Australian Research Council on interacting networks in cells related to insulin signalling. Other interests include Lévy processes, perturbation analysis for heavy-tailed risk models, large deviations for non-monotone stochastic recursions, and proportional fairness in heavy traffic for bandwidth-sharing networks. She has supervised six PhD theses on these topics.
Prof. Vlasiou is associate editor in two journals and has refereed for about 45 international journals, conferences, and national science foundations. Her research has been funded by grants exceeding 4.5M from more than 10 science foundations, universities, societies, and organisations. She is the co-author of more than 45 refereed papers, the co-recipient of the best paper award in ICORES 2013, the Marcel Neuts student paper award in MAM8, and of the 3rd prize of the 8th conference in Actuarial Science.

Other random facts of interest (at least to me) are that I’m Greek; married; have three little kids that I find thoroughly adorable and dare you to say otherwise; I love chocolate (to my waist’s detriment) and tea (my dentist despairs); I love mentoring students and have been known to spent marathon meetings with students needing a friendly ear; I’m a sucker for a good problem, be it maths or sudoku; I love languages, whether it is linguistics, learning them, maths and languages, quirky facts – you name it; and it’s definitely sea-swimming over mountain climbing (in fact, after stopping with professional handball, getting me to do any physical exercise is a challenge).

I am very happy to join the EEMCS community at UT. I joined full of hope and looking forward to new challenges (yes, it sounds trite, but it is true) and to expanding my research interests in a new (to me, of course) direction – roughly speaking that of optimisation-driven stochastic systems. The only tiny detail is that I started on 1 March 2020, so I’ve spent 99 percent of my UT employment in lockdown. This has made it rather challenging to start on any plans I had, but not impossible. This is due to the wonderful colleagues at DMMP, who embraced me as if I have been with them for decades. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I look forward to seeing you all on campus, Corona-free. 

Dr. Ashoke Sinha 

Dr. Ashoke Sinha started officially from the first of Januari. He will be asked to write an introductory piece for the next educational newsletter.