Very little explanations on quite complex matter (especially on branching bisimulation). References to the book are helpful except that sometimes it has different definitions. For example the books definition of the language is the set of non-extendable traces while the lector treats it as the set of terminated traces. The description of alternating bit protocol is absolutely beyond my understanding. Though its rather simple and well described in wikipedia.

Content is very unique and nice, but delivery is quite poor. The instructor is murmuring almost every word, and pronunciation is unclear, so that I had to just read the subtitle instead of actually listening to the lecture. It was just too painful for me that I am now hesitating whether I should continue to the next part or not...

A little coarse course.

This course is incredibly information dense in lectures, and very light on examples and why and how to apply what you've learned:

First: there are no problem sets and very few examples, making it hard to explore the topics discussed in the lecture. I'm not the best listener, so maybe everything is clear and I'm missing it, but doing is the way I learn best. Also, I can find almost no reference to this topic anywhere else which is a little unusual

Second: the lectures don't motivate the topic in any practical way. Even the 'alternating bit' protocol lecture was just discussing the solution to the problem itself. Having watched all the lectures I still don't know what I would use any of this topic for. Also couldn't get the 'alternating bit protocol' software to work, just crashed on my osx laptop.

I would love to do a class on system validation, Coq, TLA+, etc. are all interesting topics to me, I just want a class that helps me do those things.

Very nice course to learn about behavioural equivalance. Sometimes it was kinda hard to keep track of the different types of bisimulation. A 5 min recap/summarization video about weak/strong/branching/rooted/divergence bisimulation would have made it perfect for me.

This was a really good course. The professor is good as well. I would certainly recommend that people take this course.

Good course on Automata and behavioural equivalences.

The assessment questions are really challenging.

Very interesting and a good fine-tuning experience to my brain relating to systems! Awesome!

Although superficial, it is a very good MOOC for introducing LTS testing.

I've learn more thing's in this course..., thank you Coursera :) :) :)

Thanks! Very well done for an introductory course.

Very helpful for me to learn about the automata

Very helpful! Thank you very much!

Useful introduction.

ITS REALLY USEFUL

Very Good Subject

Useful knowledge

Fully satisfied

thx a lot prof.

It was amazing

very helpful

Very nice!

This is a very basic course in automata theory and covers it at a very high level. However, it is the first course in a four course series, so this is understandable. One feature of the course that I very much appreciated was that, on both on-line exercises and quizzes, if a wrong answer was chosen, the reason it was an error was explained. This corrective feedback very much helped in overall understanding.

I have only two complaints, both of which are minor. First of all, one lesson uses a tool that is available on-line to demonstrate a particular graph reduction (the "alternating bit protocol" example). Presently, what is available on-line is a bit out of sync with what is described in the lesson.

Second is the general "feel" of most of the problems. The problems are based on graphs, and the solutions are more from observation of the graph rather than analysis. Again, this may be more due to the fact that this course is used to provide background for succeeding courses than anything else.

Overall, I am satisfied with the course. But in order to do any sort of system validation will require taking the next three courses in the sequence.

I really like the subject of the course. The presentation was really good. However, some of the concepts were not so easy to understand. The course does not provide any reading, so I had to watch the lectures again if I forget some of the details. Eventually I've started taking detailed notes and added screenshots to my notebook. I wish I could have more exercises just for practice that would not be graded. That would provide a safe env. to learn and practice before taking final tests. Some of the answers to exercises were very helpful to learn the concepts better. So, more such practical exercises would be helpful.

I have appreciated the pedagogic presentation. Some concepts, quite well introduced by examples, would have deserved to have their formal definitions presented.