Syllabus for Roster(s):

  • 15F ECE 2066-100 (ENGR)
In the UVaCollab course site:   15F ECE 2066-100 (ENGR)

Course Description (for SIS)

ECE 2066: Science of Information

Course Description

Fundamental changes in many professions have arisen to take advantage of new modes of information creation, storage, transmission, retrieval, management, and display. Professionals in all disciplines, including but not limited to those in engineering and science, require grounding in the fundamental principles of information science if they are to make effective use of new information technologies. This course provides students from all disciplines with knowledge regarding the fundamental principles governing information, including concepts as the nature of information, bandwidth, binary representation, compression, etc. We will also cover example information technologies based on these principles.

The broad base of scientific principles underlying information engineering communicated in this course will serve students well in their future studies and careers. In modern life we must deal with an unprecedented amount of information provided by diverse sources, such as the internet with its ever-expanding array of wireless information appliances (mobile phones, personal digital assistants, palmtop computers, to name a few). Future leaders will be those familiar with the capabilities and applications of communications networks, information processors, and other information systems yet to be invented. Information science concepts presented in this course underlie activities you will undertake in the future, whether it be electronic commerce, computational simulations, or bioinformatics.

Course Learning Objectives

The learning objectives for this course are:

1.  To provide a solid foundation in the scientific principles underlying the representation, transmission, transformation, and storage of information.

2.  To provide a basis for understanding the limits of information engineering in terms of entropy, bandwidth, and noise.

3.  To familiarize students with technological systems based on information science concepts, including telephony, music reproduction, the internet, and the global positioning system.

4.  To illustrate information science concepts through hands-on experience using algorithms for information coding, compression, error correction, modulation, and filtering.

Course Pre-requisite or Co-requisite

None

Topical Outline

  • What is Information?

    • Distinction between information and meaning

    • Elementary information theory

    • Entropy, channel capacity, information coding

    • Fundamental theorem of information theory

  • Representation of Information

    • Binary representation

    • A/D conversion: sampling, quantization, bit accuracy

    • Alphanumeric data representation; Huffman coding, ASCII coding

    • Representation of visual and audio information

  • Information Transmission

    • Noise, signal to noise ratio, decibels, latency

    • Amplitude, frequency, and pulse modulation

    • Time, frequency, and code division multiplexing

    • Spectrum, bandwidth, inverse-square law

    • Shannon-Hartley Law

    • Information networks: circuit and packet switching, the internet, public switched telephone network

    • Spectrum allocation

  • Information Transformation

    • Information redundancy and data compression

    • Audio, text, and image compression schemes

    • Error detection and correction

    • Data security and cryptography

    • Steganography

    • Information in the frequency domain

    • Sampling theorem, sampling frequency, aliasing

    • Modular arithmetic

    • Binary arithmetic using digital logic gates

  • Information Technology

    • Silicon technology and scaling

    • Moore’s Law

    • Fiber optic transmission systems

    • The global positioning system (GPS)

    • Random number generation