Why do you need to learn the course?

Signals and systems are everywhere in your life.  If you want to analyze signals and systems in a rigorous way to gain deep understanding of your life, you will have to possess some fundamental concepts of signals and systems and basic skills that can be used to process signals and analyze systems.  If you are going to work in engieering fields, Signals and Systems is a course you have to learn and learn well.

What do you learn in the course?

The course is about, implied by the name, signals and systems. We will study two things.  One is to represent signals and the other is to describe systems.

We will learn to represent signals in the time domain, in the frequency domain, and in the complex frequency domain.  The basic idea is that, there are mulitple ways to represent the same signals and you will be able to select the most convenient way to represent them, depending on your applications. And there are also more than one way to describe systems, and again, you will be able to select the most convenient way to describe them, depending on your applications, as well.

What can we do after we learn the course?

Once you understand the basic ideas in "Signals and Systems," you will not have any major problems in learning other relevant courses in the following semesters. It helps you establish general approaches for analyzing signals and systems, given that they all have to satisfy certain conditions. In the following semesters, depending on your majors, other courses will assume that you understand the general approaches and more sophasticated methods will be introduced on top of them.

This will be discussed in the first class.

Midterm (closed book) 20%

Final (closed book)         50% (sheet score >= 60 points at least)

Assignments         10%

Labs/simulations 10%

SPOC         10%

Three tests will be given during the semester on SPOC, separate from the midterm and the final.