I am enthusiastic about helping others understand materials and generous with offering my views and knowledge. On these occasions, I have the tendency to be particularly patient, trying to think from their angle and then seek explanation from mine. There is often a strong sense of responsibility in me to see that I am doing my best to offer the help.

Teaching is about mutual interaction, through which the teacher also learns from the students, analyzing their problems and improving his own. I think it is quite important to keep the interaction between an instructor and his students at a free and equal level so that the students can get really involved, exchanging their throughts openly, revealing their problems instantly, and providing their feedback timely.

I have received long time training in computer science, mathematics, and physics (see my CV for a course list). My interests span a wide range from computer programming and data structures, to applied mathematics, mechanics, and control. I would be very comfortable with teaching at least the following courses:

• basic CS : programming (C/C++, Lisp), artificial intelligence, data structures, algorithms, discrete mathematics.

• applied CS : robot manipulation and motion planning, computer vision.

• advanced CS : machine learning, computational geometry, complexity, logics and semantics.

• applied math : numerical methods, optimization, operations research, differential geometry

Following is a brief account of my prior teaching and TAing experience.

In spring 1998, I was hired by the CMU Robotics Institute to teach a graduate level course "Math Fundamentals for Robotics". The course covered topics in numerical methods, optimization, and statistics. I extended the old syllabus to include fast Fourier transform, linear programming, and dynamic programming. Under no TA support (due to an administration problem), I showed great zeal and invested a lot of time and effort in the course. Driven by responsibility, I single-handedly designed all homework assignments and the final, graded them, and wrote sample solution to every problem. Throughout the course I received a lot of positive feedback from the students; the satisfaction level was quite good.

I had also been the teaching assistants to two undergraduate computer science courses: "PASCAL Programming Language" at the University of Science and Technology of China in Spring 1988, and "Artificial Intelligence" at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 1992. Both courses had heavy programming components requiring PASCAL and Lisp, respectively, which I enjoyed very much. My primary duties included designing and grading homework problem sets and exams, and also preparing their sample solutions. TAing the AI course at CMU was indeed a great experience in terms of both interacting with the students and improving my oral presentation skills. I spent more than 20 hours per week on this course, giving two lectures, one on planning and the other one on action & perception. The second lecture was especially well received by the students as I went beyond the textbook to briefly introduce some new techniques (back then) in robotics.