Professor
Jonathan Kao
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2022 - A fantastic class with an outstanding professor. Kao is literally the goat of EE department at the moment. The class is genuinely one of the toughest one I will take at UCLA but Kao tries the best to make it easy to understand using intuition. Using intuition is the most important part of his class and you must learn his way to better grasp the concepts. Attending his lectures are so worth it. I never missed a single lecture because I knew its impossible to learn the same way online in his recordings. Make good notes and cheat sheet for the exam. You should attend Rakshith's discussions and office hours if you are ever struggling. Trust me in the coming years he's gonna have a big name in EE TAs. Hes the most kind and respectful and works beyond his hours to teach you more about the content. The exams are tough. Make sure you practice from the previous years papers to be better prepared. If you mess in the midterms, Kao allows replacing it with final upon a better performance. Take this class and you will actually fall in love with the title "Systems and signals". Good Luck :D
Fall 2022 - A fantastic class with an outstanding professor. Kao is literally the goat of EE department at the moment. The class is genuinely one of the toughest one I will take at UCLA but Kao tries the best to make it easy to understand using intuition. Using intuition is the most important part of his class and you must learn his way to better grasp the concepts. Attending his lectures are so worth it. I never missed a single lecture because I knew its impossible to learn the same way online in his recordings. Make good notes and cheat sheet for the exam. You should attend Rakshith's discussions and office hours if you are ever struggling. Trust me in the coming years he's gonna have a big name in EE TAs. Hes the most kind and respectful and works beyond his hours to teach you more about the content. The exams are tough. Make sure you practice from the previous years papers to be better prepared. If you mess in the midterms, Kao allows replacing it with final upon a better performance. Take this class and you will actually fall in love with the title "Systems and signals". Good Luck :D
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - Hands down my favorite class I've taken at UCLA so far. A mix of neuroscience, signal processing, and ML, it really teaches a lot of useful skills that can be used in a lot of diffferent fields of EE and CS. Homeworks are hard and primarily math focused or coding in python and numpy focused, and are *very* time intensive, don't start too late! Kao's 4 late days policy saved me a couple times for sure though during the quarter. Tests are also a doozy, but shoutout to the TA Tonmoy for his goated review sessions and Kao for providing all the previous midterms/finals to help you study. A lot of the tools that we've used in this class: numpy, signal processing/filtering, clustering, have come up for me already in EE research and throughout CS internships so this class has definitely helped a lot in terms of experience that can be used in industry. The class material itself is extremely interesting to me as well so I'd definitely recommend it!
Spring 2022 - Hands down my favorite class I've taken at UCLA so far. A mix of neuroscience, signal processing, and ML, it really teaches a lot of useful skills that can be used in a lot of diffferent fields of EE and CS. Homeworks are hard and primarily math focused or coding in python and numpy focused, and are *very* time intensive, don't start too late! Kao's 4 late days policy saved me a couple times for sure though during the quarter. Tests are also a doozy, but shoutout to the TA Tonmoy for his goated review sessions and Kao for providing all the previous midterms/finals to help you study. A lot of the tools that we've used in this class: numpy, signal processing/filtering, clustering, have come up for me already in EE research and throughout CS internships so this class has definitely helped a lot in terms of experience that can be used in industry. The class material itself is extremely interesting to me as well so I'd definitely recommend it!
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2022 - I don't have anything to say that others haven't already said, Professor Kao is truly one of the best lecturers at UCLA and I would highly recommend this class if you are interested in Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Also, the TAs for this class were amazing, especially Tonmoy Monsoor. Tonmoy is insanely knowledgeable about the topic and his discussions were super useful for the homeworks! Grading: Homework: 40% (5 homeworks) Midterm: 30% Final Project: 30% Extra Credit: 0.5% for filling out class eval, up to 1.5% for participating on piazza (in a useful way), and some extra credit given on the midterm (final question on the exam is optional extra credit)
Winter 2022 - I don't have anything to say that others haven't already said, Professor Kao is truly one of the best lecturers at UCLA and I would highly recommend this class if you are interested in Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Also, the TAs for this class were amazing, especially Tonmoy Monsoor. Tonmoy is insanely knowledgeable about the topic and his discussions were super useful for the homeworks! Grading: Homework: 40% (5 homeworks) Midterm: 30% Final Project: 30% Extra Credit: 0.5% for filling out class eval, up to 1.5% for participating on piazza (in a useful way), and some extra credit given on the midterm (final question on the exam is optional extra credit)
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2022 - This is a interesting seminar that introduces you to the research of biomedical devices that interface directly with neurons (brain machine interfaces or BMIs), and you get to hear Kao discuss about his research as well. The workload is very light, lecture notes are posted on BruinLearn, and only has a final project (fairly easy to complete) assigned during the last two weeks of the quarter that for my year is completed in MATLAB (Kao has plans to update this to Python like he did for assignments for his ECE 102 class).
Fall 2022 - This is a interesting seminar that introduces you to the research of biomedical devices that interface directly with neurons (brain machine interfaces or BMIs), and you get to hear Kao discuss about his research as well. The workload is very light, lecture notes are posted on BruinLearn, and only has a final project (fairly easy to complete) assigned during the last two weeks of the quarter that for my year is completed in MATLAB (Kao has plans to update this to Python like he did for assignments for his ECE 102 class).
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - Be prepared to spend 20+ hours a week on the homework assignments. I learned a ton from this course. It makes it to where AI/ML is not a black box anymore. You can understand how things are working and how it all comes back to the math. The lectures are very good. The professor and TAs are very helpful. It is a great course which I would recommend if you are single and have the time.
Winter 2021 - Be prepared to spend 20+ hours a week on the homework assignments. I learned a ton from this course. It makes it to where AI/ML is not a black box anymore. You can understand how things are working and how it all comes back to the math. The lectures are very good. The professor and TAs are very helpful. It is a great course which I would recommend if you are single and have the time.