Mentoring

Mentored forty Master of Science students from the USC Viterbi Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science and Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering during 2013 to 2022 on various computer vision, image processing and machine learning related projects. As a mentor, I thorougly enjoyed sharing the experience on solving a problem from the first priniciples and it was a bi-directional learning (learning from the students as well). I always enjoy sharing my knowledge and to mentor juniors to conduct quality research from bottom-up. As a mentor, I was responsible for:

• Help define a clear project/research topic, scope, milestones, and success criteria
• Guide literature review: what to read, how to summarize, how to position the work
• Advise on technical approach: architecture/design choices, algorithms, modeling, or hardware/firmware strategy
• Support implementation: code quality, version control, reproducibility, testing, and debugging practices For Electrical Engineering (hardware): safety, lab practices, measurement plans, instrumentation use, calibration, and experimental setup
• For Machine Learning systems: data collection/cleaning, baselines, evaluation metrics, ablation studies, and error analysis
• Review deliverables: reports, thesis drafts, posters, presentations, and documentation
• Run regular check-ins: set agendas, track progress, unblock issues, and adjust scope/timeline
• Ensure research integrity: proper citations, no plagiarism, ethical data use, and (if applicable) IRB/compliance awareness
• Coach professional development: communicating results, teamwork, and preparing for internships/jobs/PhD (as appropriate)