Schedule

Lecture and tutorial plan with slides and suggested readings.

Lectures

This is a tentative schedule and may change as the course proceeds. Check Piazza and Canvas for updates.

Lectures Dates Topic Notes
Week 1Jan. 5 - Jan. 9What is Intelligence ? ; Feasibility of Learning Notes 1
Slides 
Week 2Jan. 12 - Jan. 16Feasibility of Learning (contd) : Generalization Bounds and VC dimension Notes 2
Week 3Jan. 19 - Jan. 23 Perceptron and Stochastic Gradient Descent
Assignment - 1 released (Jan 19)
Notes 3
Week 4Jan. 26 - Jan. 30 Kernels and Beginnings of Neural Networks
Assignment - 1 due (Feb 1)
Notes 4
Week 5Feb. 2 - Feb. 6 Deep Fully Connected Networks and Backpropagation
Assignment - 2 released (Feb 2)
Notes 5
Week 6Feb. 9 - Feb. 13 Convolutional Neural Networks Notes 6
Term Break Feb. 16 - Feb 20
Week 7Feb. 23 - Feb. 27 Classification Loss Function, and Practical ML : Validation, Hyperparameters
Assignment - 2 due (March 1)
Notes 7-8
Week 8Mar. 2 - Mar. 6 MidTerm Quiz (~ March 2nd)
Regression and Regularization
Notes 9
Week 9Mar. 9 - Mar. 13 Optimization, Convexity, Gradient Descent
Assignment - 3 released (Mar 9)
Notes 10
Week 10Mar. 16 - Mar. 20 Convergence Rate for Gradient Descent and Accelerated Gradient Descent (Momentum)
Course Project Proposal due (Mar 20)
Week 11Mar. 23 - Mar. 27 PCA, Clustering, Decision Trees
Assignment - 3 due (Mar 22)
Notes 11
Week 12Mar. 30 - Apr. 3 Introduction to Reinforcement Learning, Deep Q Networks
Assignment - 4 released (Mar 30)
No lecture on April 3rd, 2026 (Good Friday)
Notes 12
Week 13Apr. 6 - Apr. 10 No lecture on April 6th, 2026 (Easter Monday)
Policy Gradient Methods, Sequence Models
Assignment - 4 due (Apr 12)
Course Project Report Due April 15

Tutorials

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Fri., MCLD 3002

Tutorials Dates Topic Slides Suggested Readings
Jan. 5 - Jan. 9No tutorials on Week 1
Jan. 12 - Jan. 16No tutorials on Week 2
Jan. 19 - Jan. 23Tutorial on prototype based classifier for Assignment-1, Anthony Cheng
Jan. 26 - Jan. 30No tutorials, but TA Beidi Zhao will be present after class
to help with Assignment-1
Feb. 2 - Feb. 6Tutorial on PyTorch for Assignment-2, Anthony Cheng code
Feb. 9 - Feb. 13Tutorial on CNN training for Assignment-2, Beidi Zhao
Feb. 23 - Feb. 27No tutorials, but TA Beidi Zhao will be present after class
to help with Assignment-2