MECE 5397 - System Identification (Dr. (Finally a great professor) Franchek)

 First of all, if you don't like Franchek you must hate engineering. He really tries to reach every single student and will stay after class to make sure every student has their questions answered. I feel he genuinely wants you to succeed and is one of the RAREST of examples (at UH) of what a proper professor should be. He's very responsive to email and will give you some guidance, but not too much as to give away the answer.

Putting away the gratuitously effusive soapbox now...

Concepts in this class were interesting (to me) and actually useful, though at first system ID doesn't mean much as a class title. So, If you haven't started yet and you're like "what the fuck is system identification?"...

System ID: The first assignment was all about filtering the input data (in my experience, a very important thing to learn!), and you will apply these filters in subsequent assignments. The next part of the class showed ways of classifying data such as in maintenance forecasting to predict when a piece of equipment will fail first. (First picture) Another, larger, portion of the class dealt with several ways to reverse engineer step response data (yes, as in Bode plots and transient response plots (pictures 2 and 3)) to get the model of the system response and therefore predict how the system would respond. The lessons build on each other, i.e. parts of the first assignment will be used in the second and so forth. Not all the time though. Like the data classification stuff was not used later in the system modeling assignments. 

You don't need to know a LOT of MaTlAb, but it helps. He scores you not only on accuracy, but presentation of results as well. He basically gave us all the necessary code. We just had to put it together and maybe add a little more, then make it look pretty-ish.

He says many time during the class, "you can make a career out of this one thing". I believe him. System ID is everywhere and shapes the way you interact with day to day things like your car, phone sensors, noise cancelling headphones, etc...

One last thing. HE WAS USING MATLAB 2015B WITH NO TOOLBOXES. YES, YOU READ ME, NO TOOLBOXES FOR AT LEAST THE FIRST HALF OF THE SEMESTER. MAKE SURE YOUR CODE CAN RUN ON 2015B!!!!! I installed a fresh barebones copy of 2015b (less than 1GB) so I knew that it would run. And YES, I highly suggest you do this. There are some subtle changes in every version of Matlab and one code may not run on the next version! So save yourself the headache...

In the Dropbox, I have the lectures and videos. Not dropping my code in (sorry) as I'm sure he would change things up again for the next semester anyway. He makes his own curriculum (and does it pretty well I might add), but the videos should help a bit. I will also include some transcribed Matlab code from the lectures as it was kind of annoying not being able to cut and paste from the slides. Cheers!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6bgnzdvv65qphiz/AACz6v8AHWdPmQab9yPSDN5-a?dl=0