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Leila De Floriani
CMSC401 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/21/2025 |
Note that this course is cross-listed with GEOG470. Dr. De Floriani is one of the most qualified professors I've ever had. She's an absolute genius about the material that she teaches, and I'm sure she would be more than willing to talk for hours with you in depth about any topic that you were interested in. She can seem really harsh at first because of her sharp Italian accent, but underneath that she is very kind, very helpful, and really wants all of her students to succeed. All of the material she taught was on her slides for the course, so a lot of students ended up skipping virtually all of her lectures. I was one of the few who went to class almost every time, and although it wasn't necessary, she gave pretty good lectures and built on the content in the slides well. Her lectures weren't very engaging and there wasn't a lot of room to ask or answer questions, it was mostly just listening to her talk. But she taught pretty well. Course communication wasn't always the best and sometimes she would cancel class or make it virtual last minute, but it was never very problematic. The workload was pretty light, with the entire class graded off of just 2 coding assignments, 2 written assignments, 1 final coding project, and 1 final exam. The coding assignments were quite easy for me as a CS major, probably because it is also taught for GEOG students with less coding experience. She expected a lot of detail for the written assignments, but as long as you gave that it was fine. The coding project was also pretty easy and just took a lot of time, but all the information you needed to complete it was provided. It was also cool; it was doing spatial analysis with LiDAR data. I was worried about the final exam because it was closed-notes with no cheat sheets or anything, and there was a lot of material taught, but she really only asked about the stuff we really stressed and spent a lot of time going in depth on, so it was pretty fair. TL;DR: Dr. De Floriani is well qualified for what she does and clearly knows basically everything about geospatial algorithms and data structures. Her lectures were not very engaging and all her material was on her slides, but she still spoke well and it was decently easy to follow. The workload was light and pretty easy for me as a CS major, as long as you've done 330 and 351 you'll be fine. It was a cool intersection of computer science with geometry and spatial data science, and I'd recommend it to anyone with at least a little interest in the subject material. |