This review is from Winter 2024, which was the first and last time this class was offered as an elective, in the future this class will be a core class so a lot might change with it.

Logistics:
Discussion was not mandatory and it was essentially just office hours
4 HW assignments graded on correctness
1 Midterm
Take-home final
92 for an A, 95 for an A+ (all other grades were lowered respectively, and he curved so that the mean of the class was an A)
He posts the slides after the lecture

Overall I very much enjoyed this class and I feel like I learned a lot, professor Gao is a great person and is always willing to help you answer any question. He is very approachable after class and even with setting up extra office hours. However, I had some problems with this class (I assume this is mainly because this was his first time teaching the class and this isn't really his area of research/expertise).

The main difficulty of this class was that the HWs seemed somewhat disconnected to the lecture, his lectures were overall pretty good but he never really covered any sample problems (although the was very helpful in office hours). He also can sometimes be very messy when using the whiteboard and he might start writing all over the place which sometimes makes it hard to follow.
I took this class at the same time as BE 120 and that made it much easier as there was a lot of overlap of content which in a way helped "double reinforce" what I learned in each.

I am not sure as how this class will be structured in the future, but I 100% recommend going to office hours and actively participating in lectures and if you don't understand something definitely don't be scared to ask (in class or outside). You should also skim the book and use YouTube as there are a lot of great videos. His lectures are very long and detailed and contain ALOT of information, however, for exams he only cares about the main ideas and not all the small details.

Lastly, this isn't something that he can control but sometimes his accent might make it hard to make out certain words. However I am personally used to this as I am not from US and I have an accent myself, and you will get use to it pretty quickly.