Teaching

Courses

My course materials

I am sharing some of my presentations/reports/notes, hoping that it may be useful for others as well.

My courses materials@MIT

6.454 Graduate Seminars in Area I (Fall 2011)

I presented a few papers on the bounds on reliable boolean function computation with noisy boolean gates:

• R. L. Dobrushin and S. I. Ortyukov, Lower bound for the redundancy of self-correcting arrangements of unreliable functional elements , Prob. Inf. Transm., vol. 13, pp. 59-65, 1977.
• N. Pippenger, On networks of noisy gates, Proc. 26th IEEE Symp. Foundations Comput. Sci., 1985, pp. 30-36.
• P. Gacs and A. Gal, Lower bounds for the complexity of reliable boolean circuits with noisy gates, IEEE Trans. Inform. Th., Vol. 40, No. 2, Mar. 1994.
• Presentation slides (PDF)

6.897 Seminars on Cloud Computing (Spring 2011)

This is a reading course on cloud computing systems and I presented the following paper:

• A. Ghodsi, M. Zaharia, B. Hindman, A. Konwinski, S. Shenker, and I. Stoica, Dominant resource fairness: Fair allocation of heterogeneous resources in datacenters, Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on Networked systems design and implementation (NSDI'11)
  • Presentation slides (PDF)

6.451 Coding Theory (Fall 2010)

I worked with my colleagues Gauri Joshi, Joong Bum Rhim and John Sun, to learn about fountain codes by surveying various papers on the topic and produce the following course report:

• Report on Fountain Codes
• Presentation on Fountain Codes
• An illustration on the fountain code decoding (AVI, 3.5M)
  • If opening in the browser does not work, try downloading the video first. And NO tech support will be provided. Good luck :)

6.454 Graduate Seminars in Area I (Fall 2009)

I presented the following papers together with John Sun:

• Lav R. Varshney, Dr Per Jesper Sjöström and Dmitri B. Chklovskii. Optimal information storage in noisy synapses under resource constraints , Neuron, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 409-423, November 2006
  • Presentation: Optimal information storage in noisy synapses under resource constraints
• Toby Berger and William Levy, Information Transfer by Energy-Efficient Neurons , preprint
  • Presentation: Information Transfer by Energy-Efficient Neurons

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My courses materials@University of Toronto

GGR252: Marketing Geography (Spring 2006)

• GGR252 Review Notes (PDF)

FCS195 French Culture Studies (Spring 2005)

Napoleon to Asterix: (all 11 lectures in a ZIP file)

• Lecture 1 From Citizen Bonaparte to Emperor Napoleon
  
• Lecture 2 Napoleonic iconography
  
• Lecture 3 Signs and symbols: the building of an empire Romanticism and Victor Hugo
  
• Lecture 4 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris
  
• Lecture 5 Eugene Delacroix and Romantic painting
  
• Lecture 6 Monarchy, Empire or Republic? Daumier's political caricatures
  
• Lecture 7 Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
  
• Lecture 8 Society and drama at the turn of the century
  
• Lecture 9 The Four -isms: Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism
  
• Lecture 10 Art in literature and music
  
• Lecture 11 Asterix the Gaul: a comic "rewriting" of history
  

ECE298 System Design and Technical Communication (Fall 2004)

I typed the following course notes, partially as a way to learn LaTeX.

• Notes for ECE298 Textbook (PDF)

  Design For Electrical and Computer Engineers, J. Eric Salt & Robert Rothery, John Wiley & Sons, 2001

Links

• Giving a Talk, by Professor Kschischang
• Tricki: a Wiki intended to develop into a large store of useful mathematical problem-solving techniques.