The Grad Affairs Committee (GAC) meetings this fall term will be bi-weekly. The agenda will be sent to the @dcsupdate digest. It will also be available on www.cs.toronto.edu/~jepson/gac/ along with brief minutes of our meetings. New discussion items for the GAC can be raised by emailing Allan Jepson (GAC Chair), or Peter Marbach (Associate Chair, Graduate), or any other member of the committee (see below). The meetings this fall will be on Fridays from 1:00-2:00, in the follwing rooms: Oct. 30th PT266 Nov.13th BA5256 Nov.27th PT266 Dec.11th PT266 All members of the department are welcome to attend. If you cannot make a meeting, please feel free to discuss your views with one of the GAC committee members. Current agenda: 1. [Sponsor CSGSBS]. Assign each grad student a faculty member as a mentor (in addition to a supervisor). 2. [Sponsor ACG] Whether non-DCS graduate courses should be allowed to count towards MSc and PhD breadth, such as various ECE, Math, and Stats courses. If this is to be allowed, what are appropriate criteria and what is the process for making such a decision? 3. [Sponsor CSGSBS] Make the grad skills seminar mandatory for our grad students to take. 4. [Sponsor ACG] Currently it is the Chair's decision whether or not to allocate extra TA hours for grad courses over the normal number of TA hours for the class size. Should the ACG or GAC make recommendations to the chair? On what basis? 5. [Sponsor ML] The ML faculty would like to cross-list their intro to ML course, CSC2515H, with the UG course CSC 411. GAC membership: Allan Jepson (GAC committee chair) , Aleksandar Nikolov , Christina Christara , Fairgrieve, Tom , Gerald Penn , Liu, David , Marbach, Peter (ex-officio, ACG) , Ruslan Salakhudinov , Mahtab Sabet , Matt Shepherd , Nick Spooner , Stephen Cook