Hands-On Dependability

Dear HOD students,

If you participated in the exam retake, you should by now see your points and grade (there is a dedicated email sent out as well).

Exam inspection is possible next Tuesday, May 16th, between 11:45 - 12:15 in E1.3 Room 528. You do not need to register for this inspection but must bring your student ID. You will not be allowed to take pictures or notes during the inspection.

Best Regards,
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

The retake for the exam takes place on Mo, May 8th at 16:00 sharp in E1.3 HS003. Registration is already open (both in dCMS and LSF). If you took the exam, you must wait until we have entered the grades into LSF. This will happen quickly after the exam inspection next Monday.

Best regards
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

If you participated in the exam, you should by now see your points and grade (there is a dedicated email sent out as well).

Exam inspection is possible next Monday, April 3rd, between 13:30 - 14:30 in E1.3 Room 528. You do not need to register for this inspection but must bring your student ID. You will not be allowed to take pictures or notes during the inspection.

Best Regards,
The HOD Team

Dear students,

fortunately, we have to shift the exam room (as so many of you passed the projects and registered for Monday). Everything stays the same, except that we now write in Bldg. E2.2 Günter-Hotz Lecture Hall. You can find your assigned seat on your personal status page.

With that, good luck preparing for the exam and see you on Monday.

Best Regards,
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

now that your admission for the exam is clear, you can register for the exam. Both dCMS and HISPOS/LSF are ready to take on your exam registrations until February 27th. You only have to register in one of the two (or VIPA, if you do economics). For HISPOS/LSF, we are importing your status after Feb 27th so that you also see the status in dCMS.

Good luck preparing for the exam, and see you on Feb 27th for a Q&A if you have questions.

Regards,
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

on Feb, 8th 2023 the presence period of HOD comes to a close. On that day, we have two things in the usual slot:

• A guest lecture by Timo Hönig about "Energy-aware Systems"
  (there is no exercise group or sheet, but the content is relevant for the exam)
• A wrap-up lecture with Q&A by Andreas

Both will happen in a hybrid manner, i.e. you can either come to the physical lecture hall or join in the Zoom room.

Best regards,
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

as of now, you can participate in the course evaluation (until 02.02.2023). You will find two links in the course material under "General": one for the active plenum (lecture) and one for the office hour (exercise group).

Please use this opportunity to tell us what you like about the course and, most importantly: what you would improve and change.

Best regards,
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

today's plenum ended with some non-satisfying answers to "Information Theory" questions. By reviewing the coursebook, it was clear that information and entropy were not used precisely. This section is now improved together with the task sheet.

With that, have a happy and relaxing Winter break... and don't forget project CLEARCOMM, released today!

Best regards,
The HOD Team

Dear students,

Saarland University is taking measures to save energy around the Christmas break. This means that in the week before (19.12. - 23.12.) and after (02.01. - 08.01.) the Christmas break, teaching happens virtually.

We have created a Zoom-based virtual lecture hall for both office hours and active plenum in these two weeks. The times stay unchanged. You can find the access link under materials.

We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for supporting the energy-saving efforts. By the way, the last unit of HOD will be on energy-aware systems, so stay tuned!

Best regards,
The HOD team

Dear HOD students,

while not a part of or related to HOD, we want to make you aware of the yearly Advent of Code. The website has a new two-phased challenge every day from the 1st to the 25th of December, allowing you to practice your coding skills. How you approach the challenge is up to you (obviously, we recommend to do it with Rust). If you want to maximize the learning and apply the new knowledge from HOD, an approach could be:

• Read the challenge description and use the provided test case(s) as acceptance tests for your top-level function.
• Decompose the problem into functions that solve smaller tasks and come up with useful data structures.
• Apply test-first programming to solve these smaller tasks.
• Leverage the IOSP you learned in U05 to integrate smaller functionality to solve the whole task.
• As each challenge has a second phase with a new requirement (e.g. a new data filter or computation rule), you can also experience how maintainable your code is.

Have a nice advent!

Best regards,
The HOD Team

Dear HOD students,

to provide you with an asynchronous, virtual platform for peer-to-peer help, we set up a forum. If you have doubts about the material that you want to raise before the exercise group or plenum, feel free to make a post there. Fellow students can answer your question or start a discussion on the topic. It is well-known that teaching/explaining also deepens the understanding of the one explaining, so make use of that opportunity.

The presence of the forum also implies that if you have a question that more people might have, the forum is the place to go, as opposed to a private mail to the instructor. Please only use private mail for private matters (e.g. exam registration/general organisation).

For questions that can be clarified easily, we will step in and do so (e.g. potential bugs in the book). For more intricate questions, we might defer them to the active plenum, where it is easier to explain using spoken language and visualizations.

Looking forward to a fruitful discussion in the forum!

Best regards,
The HOD Team