The material is tough but Kao is a great professor. He does his best to make the lectures clear and engaging and is always open to clarifying questions. It may be hard to pay attention for the entirety of a 2 hour lecture, but I recommend doing your best to take notes. He uploads annotated slides after each lecture that are really helpful if you need to look at examples or study. During lectures he would sometimes have online poll questions for participation points, but more often than not they ended up being cancelled (giving everyone credit) since the strain of the entire class logging in would sometimes freeze the system. Even when they did work, they are graded on participation and not accuracy.

The homework is generally difficult, but there are many resources available to you. For this quarter it was due on 11:59 PM on Fridays. Definitely start it a few days in advance so you can try out the questions and then consult the TAs (during their office hours or discussion sections) or with Kao during his office hours for help with the parts you don't understand. If you aren't able to make it to these, it helps to get to know some of your classmates and check your work with them. The first few homework assignments had MATLAB portions that were a bit tricky, but I was able to complete them with some prior programming experience and a lot of googling.

For the single midterm, a past midterm and a practice midterm were provided as review material, both with solutions. The midterm was intense but fair. I recommend studying the review material so you know what kind of problems to expect, outlining or reading over the slides to ensure you didn't miss any important concepts, and looking over your graded homework assignments so you understand what you missed. For the final, the review material, difficulty, and study methods were similar, though there were a few concepts/problems on it that I didn't anticipate. Not surprising given how many topics this class covers, just try to round out your understanding. The tests are more likely to ask you conceptual problems than the homework.

The tests have an extra credit problem at the end. Usually it doesn't look like the homework problems and it could take you a moment to figure out where to begin; do give them a shot, even a few points of partial credit can help patch holes in your score from elsewhere.

Also be sure to check Piazza if you have any difficulties with the homework or material. Most of the time if you're stuck on a particular problem, somebody has already asked a question about it already. If not, you can submit one yourself. The class was pretty helpful this quarter and the advice given to you is generally enough to nudge you in the right direction.

If you're looking to take ECE 102, Professor Kao is straight up the best professor you can take, and not because everyone else is bad, but because he's SO good. Just in general, nothing in this class was opaque or suspicious, everything has a clear structure and you know the amount of work you have to put in (which is a fair amount).
Professor Kao uses slides, and he annotates them on his iPad, posting both the original and annotated versions on CCLE for you to browse through at your own pleasure. In addition, CCLE also has baseline slides covering all the important topics listed at the beginning of the quarter, so you can get a feel of the different topics that you'd be covering in class. The slides have a clear order, and I must say, are probably the best organized lecture slides I've seen so far. They follow a clear format, doing more than just talking about a theorem to working out an example. He makes lectures engaging by talking about the application and motivation for different topics, why should we learn them, and why they're useful in the real world, and this is pretty important for engineers. Talking about AM radio stations for signal modulation, for example, really gave me an intuition about the purpose of learning signal modulation, and made it much more interesting and engaging to me than just seeing a bunch of equations. He also talks about different learning perspectives, as he draws upon his experiences taking systems and signals during his undergraduate years. You have a 5 minute break in the middle of the lecture (2 hours long), and there's supposed to be an online poll question to check for participation (graded on participation, not accuracy, and counts as extra credit), but given that the website kept on crashing, I think Professor Kao ended up giving everyone credit for participation. The only con against the lectures, which isn't even his fault, is that the room we were in seemed to have no AC, so it was stuck around 95 degrees during the entire quarter.
Make no mistake about it, this class is not easy, and I'd urge anyone to know that "really good" != "really easy class". There are around 7 homeworks in this class, and homework is a big component in the grading scheme (more on that later), so it's important to do well on them. The homework itself is extremely difficult, and time consuming. I'd recommend that you start looking at the questions themselves as soon as possible, and don't be like me and wait until Thursday night (when they're due Friday), since I ended up sleeping at 4-5 am because of this. Try giving the HW problems your best go, and then asking the TAs or your friends, since they can be extremely challenging. The benefit to this, however, is that you will be extremely well prepared for the exams, since he designs the homeworks to be harder than the exams themselves. The midterm (just one) and final are around the same difficulty as the homework (albeit slightly easier), and doing the homework really prepares you pretty well for them. You can be a little strapped for time, but overall, they're not easy, but definitely fair. Each exam has a bonus question at the end, which I'd recommend you at least attempt, because they can help if you lose points elsewhere, and generally Jonathan and the TAs are not extremely strict graders.
For administrative matters, this class is graded on the following: 30% HW, 30% Midterm, 40% Final, with an additional 2.5% in extra credit available (I believe 0.5% for instructor evaluation, 0.5% for participation, up to 1.5% for participation in Piazza). Kao also utilizes a straight scale, so no curving, but he does compensate by lowering the grade boundaries depending on how everyone does for the exams (for us, 92 and up was an A, 89 and up a A-, etc.). He also has a policy where if you do better on the final than the midterm, the final can replace the midterm grade, which he says is because his professor made him that same offer when Kao was an undergraduate, which I find to be extremely considerate of him. All homework assignments and exams are uploaded to Gradescope, so it's really easy to see how you did and where you lost points and where to improve. While I couldn't make it to his office hours, I've heard from my friends that he's really helpful and nice, and this is evident because he remembers students names when they answer questions during lecture, depending on if they've shown up to his office hours before.
Even after all that, it's the little things that make this dude the best professor to take systems and signals with. For example, on Thanksgiving holiday, he gave us an extra two days to do the homework (due Wednesday before Thanksgiving), and posted the next homework after Thanksgiving day. When we had lecture cancelled due to the wildfire, he sent the class a YouTube link of the same lecture from last year, and when students were struggling with sampling, Professor Kao sent a YouTube lecture for further help on sampling, which shows how dedicated he is to making sure that students are grasping the concepts. He'll even check during lecture, asking for a show of hands to make sure that people are following, or else he'll stop to take more questions. It's the little things as well that makes this such a great class to take, and I'd wholly recommend Professor Kao. If offered the chance I'd take him again and again for systems and signals.

Professor Kao was a really engaging lecturer that genuinely cares about his students learning. Even though this is only his second time teaching ECE 102, this class is structured very well. Kao is the sort of professor that actually takes feedback from course evals. He also did a poll in the middle of the quarter to see how it was going for us.

He posts the unannotated versions of his slides at the beginning of the quarter, so you're able to look ahead to see what's going to be covered. He also posts the annotated versions of his slides after lecture, which was a really big part of what I used to review the material. They're so good that I didn't even have to take notes for the class. He also posts past and practice midterms/finals to help you study.

The homework is pretty hard and time-consuming (there were one homework assignment that took me 15 hours to complete), but they are really helpful for learning the material. If you get stuck, Kao goes over how to the problems in office hours. There is also the class Piazza, but that is mostly student run, so you may not get the best answer. The professor and TAs sometimes step in to answer, but they mostly just endorse the student answers.

When it came time to studying for the final, I was able to do minimal studying and still get a grade slightly above median because I was able to do so much learning on the homework.

Overall, I really recommend taking 102 with Kao. This has been my favorite class so far.

Professor Kao is possibly one of the best professors I have ever had. He is extremely clear in his teachings and focuses on teaching the intuition behind many of these topics, as opposed to rote memorization. He is always willing to accommodate and help his students. During lectures, he always takes the time to ask if there are any questions, so it is extremely interactive, which can be difficult with online lectures.
The workload is intense and the homework was time consuming; however, the topic is interesting and the homework prepares you well for the midterms and finals.
Overall, I would highly recommend this professor because of his genuine care for his students and clarity in teaching.

I signed into Bruinwalk for the first time, just to review Dr. Kao. Professors who actually care about student learning are rare at UCLA and Dr. Kao is one of them. I have heard that the ECE102 material is really tough and that this can be one of the worst classes in the major. That wasn't the case with this professor. He is engaging, and presents the material in a logical way. My only complaint is that I wish he had more office hours. His homeworks are very tough and I could have used more help with them. That said, I cannot recommend Dr. Kao enough! I will be taking all of his classes for sure.

Dr. Kao is a great professor. Homework is tricky but if you can do it, you should do reasonably well on the exams. Bless this man.

Great class with an amazing professor. He really cares about student learning and is a funny and engaging lecturer. After the midterm, he announced that he would add another grading scheme allowing you to replace your midterm grade with your final grade if you performed better. Also, Kao frequently answered Piazza questions, which I really appreciated.

The homework was a bit challenging, so start early enough that you have time to ask questions.

Very fair instructor, highly recommend.

This is the third class I've taken with Professor Kao, having taken his Systems and Signals, and Neural Networks and Deep Learning classes. As always, Kao's lectures are very clear, informative and interesting.

The HW can be a bit tricky- start ahead of time and go to office hours. Throughout the quarter, Kao was very accommodating and even relaxed the grading scales at the end of quarter.

Due to COVID-19 and remote learning, we weren't able to cover the amount of material the class usually covers. However, for context: the first third of the class covers basic neuroscience, including action potentials and how the brain works. The second third covers Poisson processes and discrete classification. The third half covers decoding including Wiener and Kalman filters, which I think is the most interesting part of the course.

If you are looking for an interesting and useful elective, this is the class for you. Highly recommended- 10/10.

He really cares about how well students understand the material but when it comes to grades, he's not helpful, his weekly hws are long but easy and doable and it can really help your grade, for me the midterm was extremely hard which I failed it, but he announced in the class that back then when he took this class he failed his midterm and his professor gave him a second chance by replacing the final's grade for midterm and that's what he did for me, even though I aced the final and it got replaced with my midterm, my grade was so close to next letter grade but he didn't curve the class at all, so my advice just do the hws and try your best to get A on final because there is absolutely no curve and final basically determines your grade

Kao is one of the best professors at this school. He is clear, engaging, informative, and an incredibly supportive teacher. Would highly recommend both Kao and this class, and would easily choose to take this class again.
If you've had 102 with Kao, his style of teaching for this class is very similar. He posts unannotated slides before lecture, annotates them during lecture, and reposts them to CCLE afterwards. His unannotated slides contain information and videos, but most of the derivations and math he does by hand on blank slides. He uses polls to monitor class comprehension, and frequently stops to ask for and take questions. He uses piazza to allow students to answer each others questions, but both Kao and the TA's are present to resolve ongoing confusion.
The neuroscience and probability homeworks were written, while the decoding and classification were jupyter notebooks. They walk you through complex concepts in small increments, and are interesting and fun to work through (and great for learning python!).
Brain machine interfaces were one of the first things that drew my attention to electrical engineering, and I found it incredibly interesting to take a class in exactly that. If you have the opportunity, I would highly recommend taking this class.