Teaching Statement for Karthik Pattabiraman
Background and Philosophy
In order to be an effective teacher, one must be willing to approach every topic with the intellectual curiosity and excitement of a novice, while at the same time retaining the critical thinking and evaluation capabilities of a researcher in the area. It is this mixture of excitement and critical thinking skills that I wish to bring with me into the classroom, whether I am teaching a freshman undergraduate class or an advanced graduate class. I have been a teaching assistant for a graduate class on the design and analysis of fault-tolerant systems at the University of Illinois. My responsibilities in this course included delivering lectures, framing and grading assignments and tests, as well as guiding students in the design and implementation of course projects. I also set up a special laboratory for the class so that students could try out faultinjection experiments in a controlled environment. I have also been an instructor for introductory programming courses in my undergraduate institution. These experiences have solidified my desire to become a teacher. An important lesson I have learned from these experiences is that the most important ingredients for effective teaching are enthusiasm for the subject and healthy respect for students. These two principles form the cornerstone of my teaching philosophy. For example, when embarking on a new topic, I will try to motivate the topic with examples of where students may expect to apply the concepts they learn in the course of their profession or daily life. I find that this motivates students to pay closer attention and imbibe the concepts if they are convinced of the relevance, rather than view it as a cramming exercise for tests. Moreover, it conveys that I respect their time and effort and establishes a bond of trust with the students, which I believe is vital for a vibrant learning environment.
Undergraduate and Graduate Courses
In addition to courses in fault-tolerance and security, I am qualified to teach undergraduate and graduate courses on computer architecture, compiler design as well as on software engineering and formal methods. If needed, I can also teach courses on discrete mathematics and probabilistic methods. In addition to teaching the fundamental concepts in these areas, I will try to incorporate ideas from my own research on reliable and secure system design. For example, when teaching the concept of caches in a computer architecture class, I will introduce ideas from error-tolerant cache design, so that students can understand the tradeoffs between cache reliability and performance. Similarly, when introducing the concept of type-systems in a compiler design class, I will discuss how type-checking can help in finding security violations in code. More than the specifics of the techniques themselves, this will force students to think about the reliability and security implications of the systems they design. I believe this is an important skill in a world where errors and attacks are the norm. Moreover, approaching a topic from multiple perspectives will reinforce the concept in the students’ minds and allow them to understand how different concepts are interconnected. In addition to technical problem solving, I believe that writing is a valuable skill for engineers as they will need to explain their ideas clearly to managers and end-users. Accordingly, I will encourage students to write term papers that bring out the qualitative aspects of the ideas they learned in class. I will also encourage students to contribute articles to open forums such as Wikipedia on topics of interest to the class and give them course credit for such initiatives. I believe that explaining ideas to a non-technical audience who may not be experts in the field will prove to be an important learning experience for students. Moreover, the idea of making a useful contribution to a broader social cause (in addition to course credits) may encourage some students to put in their best efforts.
Advanced Graduate Classes
I can also see myself as teaching advanced graduate classes in one or more of the following areas: (1) Principles of trustworthy computer systems, (2) Embedded systems and hardware-software co-design and (3) Software verification and validation techniques. These courses will draw on my research experiences in these areas. I am also open to teaching other graduate classes on areas that I explore in my future research (for example, pervasive platforms and multi-core reliability). In spring 2007, I started a dependability reading group at the University of Illinois for the benefit of new graduate students in this area, and I was responsible for choosing papers to read each week. I tried to alternate between choosing contemporary and classic papers in a topic area, in order that students can get a sense of the progression of ideas in the area. This was met with positive feedback from the students and I plan to follow a similar strategy for choosing papers to read in my classes. Based on the assigned papers, I will conduct mock debates in my classes, so that students learn both to critically evaluate ideas and to clearly articulate their view-points with sound justifications. I will also encourage students to undertake course projects that are exploratory in nature, which will be evaluated more on the innovativeness of the ideas developed rather than on success or failure of the project. This will unleash the student’s creativity and allow them to explore uncharted territories. Summary: I am excited to be a teacher and would like to inspire more students to take up computer science and engineering as a career. I hope that my excitement for the subject and enthusiasm for teaching will make me an effective and engaging teacher. Page 1 of 1