Yao does not have passion for teaching and he does not honor his status as a distinguished professor. I would not care his lack of concern for teaching effectively this very difficult material; but he has so little shame that his grading system was very tough, considering his poor teaching skills plus his lack of concern, and biased favoring Asian students (especially Chinese)
Attendance: About 10% of the class used to attend his extremely boring lecture. Still, he was happy talking to a small group of students and that is not a good idea. If he knows you and he don’t like you, your grades will pay the consequences. So I strongly advice you not to be in the 10% group who usually attend lectures unless you have extremely good social skills to handle him.
Midterm: was a gift.
Final: the half was closed book and the another half was open book and open computer, so he acknowledged that he did not teach anything and tried to compensate his weakness as a professor by doing this; but the result was a massive cheating with the TAs pretending not to see anything.
Project: was easy, but he did not provide guidelines, still he graded in accordance to his criterion. If you have another option takes it. Yao should think seriously in retirement and leave his position to someone younger and unbiased, someone who really wants to teach and is passionate to do it, someone that has concern about teaching effectively.
I hope he can read this review and take my advice.

Professor Yao is just okay. His lectures are indeed very dry and consist of him reading off his slides on the projector, but at times he livens things up by talking about the real world application of what we're learning.

His homework is usually pretty straight forward, but if you run into trouble on it, the two TAs Zicong and Ni-chun are super awesome and will help you with it.

The exams are a different story though, I guess. The midterm we had (Winter 2012) was extremely easy (83% average!) and to make up for it, Professor Yao said he'd make the final a bit harder (57% closed book average, 63% open book average).

Overall, I don't think the class really builds upon itself very well, which isn't necessarily Professor Yao's fault, but for bleh the class is, Yao does an okay job.