Course descriptions

This course will offer an opportunity to explore the impact of the Internet and information technology on the practice of marketing. The Internet and information technologies have revolutionized the way companies create and maintain exchange relationships between themselves and their customers. Companies, both big and small, are in the process of using the Internet to maximize the scope, effectiveness and efficiency of their existing marketing programs. This course is designed to impart an understanding of the range of issues involved in planning and implementing effective marketing and information communication strategies for commercial or non-profit organizations. The course’s emphasis will not be on actual design of a web site, even though the merits and demerits of different layout types will be discussed. Some of the topics covered include strategic planning and its tactical implementation in electronic marketing, target market analysis and identification, the Internet’s marketing capabilities and limitations, management of customer and supplier relations concerns about privacy and ethics, and understanding the new technology’s impact on the field of marketing.

The aim of this course is to provide an understanding of how selling is critical to the success of marketing. The course will promote critical thinking skills as well as practical selling skills needed in a competitive marketplace. Course topics include, among others, selling principles and techniques, understanding of the tasks and roles of the sales manager, the management of sales professionals within an organization, developing and applying effective persuasive communications, creating a vision, developing and implementing a sales-team strategy, structuring sales-force, designing and assigning territories, recruiting, training, motivation and evaluating salespeople, methods of compensation, and forecasting sales. The emphasis will be on ways the sales-force can be molded to build long-lasting relationships with customers through the systematic analysis and solution of customers’ problems.

This course provides insights into how to create profitable brand strategies by building, measuring, and managing brand equity. The focus of the course will be at the level of the brand and the discussions will pertain to issues involved in the development and implementation of brand strategies. The course provides students with a valuable perspective, and a common denominator to interpret the potential effects and trade-offs of various strategies and tactics for their brands. In addition, the course gives students the skills and tools required to understand the different elements of a branding strategy. Students will also be able to view brands as strategic assets owned by a firm and learn how to leverage the brand to meet the overall corporate objective of a firm.

Marketing management problems, techniques and strategies needed to apply the marketing concept to the world marketplace. Understanding a country’s cultural and environmental impact on the marketing plan is emphasized, as well as competing in markets of various cultures. Worldwide consumerism, economic and social development, the spread of multinational corporations, business ethics, and current economic and marketing issues are examined.

Digital advertising is the tactic of leveraging the internet and its properties to deliver promotional ads to consumers on various channels. Unlike traditional advertising, digital advertising is more universal and flexible, enabling marketers to tell the story about their brand on the channels that their buyers frequent, using text, images, video, and more. Digital advertising can be part of the "digital noise" and part of an ongoing conversation that the brand has with its customers. Digital ads are everywhere. With digital advertising continuing to gain momentum, it is more vital than ever before to make it an integral part of the marketer's holistic marketing mix. The contents of this course can teach you how to reach larger audiences in a way that is real-time and increasingly personal, more effectively.

This course explores the impending revolution in web analytics in the era of big data. The focus will be on topics such as the Internet of Things, various social media, viral marketing, and Geo-location tracking. Students will investigate how web analytics can take a greater role in business decision- making in the future. Specifically, students will gain an understanding of the strategic and operational aspects of web analytics tools and technologies, how Web analytics can influence and create new marketing levers, and how new marketing levers impact customer relationships, brand response, and potentially, sales.

Applications of stochastic, deterministic, and simulation techniques to decision areas, such as market potential, product diversification, physical distribution alternatives, retail location, media selection, and market exposure. Quantitative and computerized methods are used heavily to enhance decision making in marketing, especially the selection, allocation, budgeting, and forecasting of marketing resources.

This course is a study of the nature of the business-to-business (organizational) marketplace concentrating on those aspects that differentiate it from consumer markets. The major focus of the course is marketing strategy, starting with an analysis of market wants and segments, concepts of pricing, distribution arrangements, and buyer/seller relations. In this last area, consideration will be given to service, personal selling, sales promotion, and advertising, as found in the organizational marketplace. At all times, emphasis is given to relating business-to-business marketing strategy to basic concepts in underlying business disciplines. Lectures and case discussions are used heavily in the course.

Special Topics in Marketing

This capstone course offers you the opportunity to apply your academic experience to conduct an experiential learning project in a designated field and apply your education in a practical manner. Students will work in teams on a single project for one partner organization. This experience will help students enhance their skills in oral and written communication, apply the knowledge acquired during the program to solve business problems involving actual data in a realistic setting, manage team dynamics, and develop a fundamental understanding of all practical aspects of Marketing program of study. This course is suitable for senior students only. The course content is updated regularly to take into account the latest marketing techniques and practices.

Marketing Internship

This advance marketing course deals with analyzing the major marketing decisions facing the firm, such as the level, mix allocation, and strategy of marketing efforts. Specific decision areas examined are market determination, pricing physical distribution, product policy, promotion, and channel management. Also examined are competitive, political, legal and social factors that may affect decision making process.

Designed for students with no prior course work in the field of marketing. A wide spectrum of marketing institutions and activities is covered. The impact of marketing on the total firm, the economy, and society in general is assessed. The course is intended to develop and organize the fundamental marketing concepts necessary to an analytical study of consumer behavior, the economic environment, and four managerial aspects of marketing. The acquisition and utilization of marketing research data for problem solving is stressed. Relation and integration of basic marketing knowledge to the successful development of sound marketing policy, planning, and strategy is developed.

An examination of the information technology that provides a basis for electronic commerce and its application in a variety of sectors and industries. Also included is coverage of the tools, skills and business concepts that surround the emergence of electronic commerce and the consequences of applying this technology to various commercial processes. Other topics are security, privacy, intellectual property rights, authentication, and legal liabilities.

An analysis of the socio-psychological foundations of consumer behavior including personality differences, needs and wants, status symbols, social change and mobility, fads and fashions. Consumer spending and saving habits, product preferences, leisure-time patterns, shopping behavior and motivation research are also examined for their impact on advertising, selling and marketing management.

This course is about the marketing challenges in an entrepreneurial firm. Successful execution of an entrepreneurial idea requires a sound marketing plan. In this course, we will investigate how marketing tools can enable entrepreneurs to realize the full potential of their ideas. The course involves research on the industry, marketing, and market, which are used to define a target market and market segmentation. It also involves developing a marketing budget, researching media platforms and determining promotional material costs. Finally, the marketing strategy describes marketing goals and objectives in a unified plan. Students will actively research and apply each component to their own business ventures, which will culminate in the development of a marketing plan.

This course offers a broad approach to marketing research as a model for acquiring, retrieving, and analyzing decision-making information, including market measurement, evaluation of sales and cost effectiveness, sales forecasting and primary marketing research studies aimed at solving specific problems. Emphasis is placed also on building a theoretical and analytical framework to provide flexibility in the design of marketing experiments and in judging recent research innovations.

Topics in Marketing

Marketing is evolving from an art to a science. Many firms have extensive information about consumers’ choices and how they react to marketing campaigns, but few firms have the expertise to intelligently act on such information. The goal of this course is to provide you with the skills needed to make intelligent use of marketing data and analytics to make business recommendations and decisions. This course also provides students with the background needed to begin working in a marketing analytics position within a corporation, a consulting firm, or a marketing research firm. The course employs a combination of lectures, articles, and “hands-on” exercises. By the end of the course, you will be able to walk into any company and help make data-driven marketing decisions.

Advanced programming techniques using data structures. Topics include recursion, lists, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, and hash tables.

Introductory course in digital logic and its specification and simulation. Number systems. Binary arithmetic. Boolean algebra. Combinational logic design. Sequential logic design (controllers). Data Path components (e.g., Registers, adders, register files, etc.). Memory components (e.g., RAM, ROM). Register transfer level (RTL) design.

Introduction to digital design techniques, logic gates, Medium Scale Integration (MSI) parts and flip-flops, Timing analysis, Programming and use of Programmable Logic Devices (PLD).

This course introduces discrete structures. Topics include basic logic, sets, relations, functions, proof techniques, counting methods, recursion, trees, and graphs.

Micro controller-based digital systems design methodology and techniques. Basic machine organization. Interface design. C and assembly language programming for real-time embedded systems.

Advanced digital design techniques, Micro controller based design, hardware, and software co design.

Analysis methods for discrete-time signals and systems in the time and frequency-domains including signal models and Fourier techniques. Continuous-time concepts are included as introductory material.

DSP programming assignments in MATLAB and/or TMS DSP processors.

Computer architecture and organization. Topics include performance evaluation, instruction, set architecture, data path, control unit, pipelining, memory hierarchy, storage, and other I/O topics.

Operating Systems

Computer Engineering Internship

Techniques for software validation and verification. Topics include: concepts of software quality (metrics, assurance, planning & implementation, process standards, validation, verification, reviews, walkthroughs and inspections). Software testing process and techniques at different levels. Validating test data.

Design of computer networks with emphasis on network architecture, protocols and standards, performance considerations, and network technologies. Topics include LAN, MAN, WAN, congestion/flow/error control, routing, addressing, broadcasting, multi-casting, switching, and inter-networking. A modeling tool is used for network design and simulation.

Computer network lab experiments with Packet Tracer, Wireshark, and other tools.

Introduction to software maintenance and re-engineering. Topics include evolution and maintenance models, re-engineering, legacy information systems, impact analysis, refactoring, program comprehension, principles of reuse and reverse engineering, approaches, and tools used to extract information from existing software systems.

Survey of artificial intelligence techniques. Topics include search, logic, knowledge representation, reasoning with uncertainty, learning, and other AI techniques.

Introduction to digital image processing. Topics include Digital image fundamentals, intensity transformations, and spatial filtering, filtering in frequency domain, Image restoration and reconstruction, Color image processing, Image compression, and Image segmentation.

Design and analysis of fault-tolerant digital systems. fault models, hardware redundancy, information redundancy, evaluation techniques, system design procedures.

Introduction to computer security and privacy. Topics include security in programs, operating systems, networks and databases.

Introduction to machine learning with images and natural text. A coverage of machine learning and data mining techniques such as decision trees, random forests, neural networks, kNN, Adaboost, stochastic gradient descent, regression, and transformers.

Robot sensors and actuators, motors, robot path planning, simultaneous localization and mapping, and robot vision.

A coverage of deep neural networks including Alexnet, convolutional neural networks, long short term memory networks, recurrent neural networks, and Resnet.

Image information, image filtering, template matching, histogram transformations, edge detection, boundary detection, region growing and pattern recognition. Complementary laboratory exercises are required.

Image and video processing lab experiments including pattern recognition, filtering, and edge detection.

Introduction to software engineering. Topics include software development life cycle, software processes, requirements engineering, software architecture and design, software testing, software evolution, and software modeling using UML

A complete design cycle. Working in small teams, students will design, document, analyze, implement, and test a product. Topics include Iteration in design, prototyping, group dynamics, design reviews, making effective presentations, concurrent design, designing for test, ethics, and standards, testing and evaluation.

A continuation of COEN 491.

Materials and device structures for applications in analog and digital electronics. Topics include characteristics and basic circuits for diode, FET transistors, BJT transistors, and operational amplifiers.

Laboratory tools and measurement techniques for basic electronic circuits using diodes, field-effect transistors, bipolar junction transistors, and operational amplifiers. Topics include DC biasing and applications in analog and digital electronics.

Circuit elements, signals, Kirchhoff’s laws, network transforms, mesh and node analysis, transient and complete response of RL, RC, and RLC circuits.

Safety, basic measurements and meters, oscilloscopes, resistor networks, measurement of capacitors and inductors, RLC circuit response.