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.

probably one of the best professors i have had in my academic career. he's really nice and answers a bunch of questions as he covers material. his class was extremely well organized; considering we were in a pandemic, he recorded literally everything he did which made it so convenient. homework takes forever and is graded really hard, but it is like 50 percent of your grade. go to office hours because he helps you solve the questions on the homework. the midterm was open note and open ccle so it was rather straightforward. it also was not proctored. the final was the same format but was substantially more difficult and lengthy. he did seem to grade a lot more lenient and he did relax the grade scale to compensate for the difficulty of the final. overall, an awesome professor. he actually listens to student feedback so if you have any issues i would address them to him. a lot of people early on in the quarter felt that the homework was too lengthy and posted about it indirectly, and the professor fixed it without the students addressing it specifically by giving out credit for certain problems without attempt. he really cares about the learning process and you can tell he's actually happy to teach and impart some knowledge to the students. awesome guy. the class is hard but prof made it bearable. highly recommend.

Professor Kao is very passionate about teaching. He does his best to make sure that the students understand the concepts covered in this class, which are definitely not the easiest. I took this class during COVID, and he is very understanding of the situation and adjusted the grading scale accordingly. It is also worth mentioning that my TA's were extremely helpful as well. Overall, I'd say Kao tries his best to make the concepts as clear as possible, and I would highly recommend him.

First things first: there are 7 HWs, 1 midterm (worth 20%) that was of reasonable difficulty (median ~78) and a final (worth 30%) that was harder than the midterm (median ~73). This wasn't too bad, though, since 50% of the course grade weightage was homework.

Kao is definitely the best you're going to get for 102. His lecture presentations are reasonably clear and thorough, although they are heavily theoretical/proof based, which means that you'll probably need pointers from the TAs or other students when doing the homework or studying for exams. Take Kao if you can; you won't regret it.