Machine Learning | Zerui "Jerry" Ma's personal website

Graduate Teaching Assistant (Machine Learning, Advanced Python, Digital Logic)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Graduate Teaching Assistant — Southern Methodist University

Lyle School of Engineering
January 2025 – May 2026 | Dallas, TX

Courses Supported

Machine Learning (Undergraduate / Graduate)
Advanced Python Programming
Digital Logic Design & Hardware Laboratories

Key Responsibilities

Instructed and mentored over 100+ students in fundamental and advanced Machine Learning concepts, including gradient descent optimization, loss functions, neural network architectures, and transformer attention mechanisms.
Led weekly hands-on coding laboratories and office hours, guiding students through implementing machine learning models from scratch in Python, PyTorch, and scikit-learn.
Designed curriculum and laboratory experiments for digital systems and VLSI testing, directing students in implementing JTAG boundary-scan controllers and debugging Verilog HDL on Xilinx FPGAs.

AI & Machine Learning Course Lecturer

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

AI & Machine Learning Course Lecturer

Governor’s Champion Summer Camp, Southern Methodist University
July 2024 | Dallas, TX

Course Overview

Designed and delivered a comprehensive 4-week curriculum covering artificial intelligence and modern machine learning for talented high school scholars.

Topics Covered

Intelligent Agents & Search Algorithms: State-space search, heuristic evaluation, and graph traversal.
Data Preprocessing & Feature Engineering: Tabular transformations, normalization, and handling missing data with Pandas and NumPy.
Supervised Learning: Linear/logistic regression, decision trees, and classification metrics.
Deep Neural Networks: Multi-layer perceptrons, activation functions, backpropagation intuition, and introductory computer vision.
Guided students through end-to-end hands-on capstone projects applying ML models to real-world datasets.