Teaching

Disclaimer

The following resources are a collection of teaching materials used in my classes, which are made available online solely for personal study purpose. They may contain, with or without acknowledgement, copyrighted materials from various sources that represent the intellectual work of other people or organization.

Data Mining Course

Despite of the large volume of data mining papers and tutorials that one can easily collect from the web, it has been surprisingly difficult to find well written ones with a good blend of clarity, technical depth and breadth and enough amount of amusement to make this domain attractive to students with diverse backgrounds. In this course, each module typically starts with an interesting real world example that gives rise to the specific research question of interest. Then, the general idea of how to tackle this problem is presented together with some intuitive and straightforward approaches. Finally, a number of representative algorithms are introduced with concrete examples to show how they function in practice. Theoretical analysis is only adopted as complements to help students better understand the key features of the techniques, instead of making things more complicated than what they should be for most students.

Academic Writing Course

Many people in academia take writing for granted: I am a researcher and so I can write and present my work. However, the flip side is actually true: You need to be effective in writing and presentation in order to progress successfully in your career. Writing is not an instinct but it can be taught and learned. Unfortunately, many non-native English speaking students receive little if any formal training in this aspect. This short course is expected to bring benefits to students in the long term by helping them master various essential skills related to academic writing and presentation, through hands-on practices of the basic rules, underlying principles, common mistakes, useful tips and things that they should always keep an eye on.