Basic Info

Instructor: Dr. Weitian Tong     Associate Professor at Department of Computer Science
Office: IT 2305
Email: wtong@georgiasouthern.edu

Please refer to our syllabus on Folio for more details, such as prerequisites, textbook, topics, objectives, learning outcomes, assessment plan, course policies, etc.

Course Schedule (timely updated!)

Date	Topics	Resources
Week 1: 01/08 – 01/14	Class begins on 01/08! Attendance Verification Syllabus Introduction Intro to Python, Anaconda, and Jupyter Notebook	Computational intelligence Difference between Soft Computing and Hard Computing Python, Command Line, Jupyter Notebook: Free Interactive Python Tutorial CONDA Cheat Sheet Markdown Cheat Sheet Video: Windows Command Line Crash Course Video: Linux Command Line Crash Course Video: Python for Beginners - Learn Python in 1 Hour Video: Markdown Crash Course Video: Jupyter Notebook Complete Beginner Guide 2023 Latex: Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes Video 1: LaTex Tutorial for Beginners Full Course Video 2: LaTeX Tutorial
Week 2: 01/15 – 01/21	Optimization	A Gentle Introduction to Optimization / Mathematical Programming The Traveling Salesperson Problem Videos: The Traveling Salesman Problem: When Good Enough Beats Perfect
Week 3: 01/22 – 01/28	Optimization (continue)	Awesome Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Resources Google OR-Tools Papers with Code: a free and open resource with Machine Learning papers, code, datasets, methods and evaluation tables
Week 4: 01/29 – 02/04	Evolutionary Computation	Textbook: Genetic Algorithms with Python Machine Learning — Evolutionary Algorithms Evolutionary Computation with Jupyter/IPython Genetic Algorithm Walkers Genetic Algorithm 2D Car Thingy Evolution Games driven by genetic algorithms Intro to Evolutionary Computation Using DEAP Videos Genetic Algorithms - The Nature of Code Hands-On Genetic Algorithms with Python: Github Repository
Please provide your rough ideas about your first Project!
Week 5: 02/05 – 02/11	Evolutionary Computation (continue)	DEAP 1.4.1 documentation: examples of common toy problems often encountered in the evolutionary computation community.
Week 6: 02/12 – 02/18	Fuzzy Computation	Introduction to Fuzzy Logic Introduction to Fuzzy Logic Implementation with Python (Heart Disease Diagnosis Project) Comparison Between Mamdani and Sugeno Fuzzy Inference System
Week 7: 02/19 – 02/25	Neural Computation: Introduction	Dive into Deep Learning Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J.D. Prince Deep Learning: An MIT Press book by Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville Machine learning cheat sheet Hugging Face: build, train and deploy state of the art models powered by the reference open source in machine learning. Neural Net Demo An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms Videos: What is a Neural Network? Gradient descent, how neural networks learn What is backpropagation really doing? Backpropagation calculus
Week 8: 02/26 – 03/03	Neural Computation (continue) Linear Neural Networks
Please provide your rough ideas about your second Project!
Week 9: 03/04 – 03/10	Neural Computation (continue) RNN Multilayer Perceptrons	Recurrent Neural Networks Modern Recurrent Neural Networks Convolutional Neural Networks Modern Convolutional Neural Networks Videos: Pytorch RNN from Scratch Long Short-Term Memory with PyTorch + Lightning CNN from Scratch Pytorch CNN example Pytorch ResNet implementation from Scratch
Week 10: 03/11 – 03/17	Spring break for students – No classes
Week 11: 03/18 – 03/24	Neural Computation (continue) CNN Transformer	Attention Mechanisms and Transformers The Illustrated Transformer An Introduction to Transformers The Transformer Family by Lilian Weng The Transformer Family Version 2.0 by Lilian Weng The Transformer model family on huggingface Videos: Pytorch Transformers from Scratch 1 Pytorch Transformers from Scratch 2
The first coding project and its literature review Due; Deadline: 11:59 pm on 03/24
Week 12: 03/25 – 03/31	Neural Computation (continue) GPT! LLM? Graph neural networks? Generative adversarial networks? (TBD)	Videos: The Exciting, Perilous Journey Toward AGI | Ilya Sutskever | TED The Inside Story of ChatGPT’s Astonishing Potential | Greg Brockman | TED "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton: The 60 Minutes Interview Andrew Ng: Opportunities in AI - 2023 The Near Future of AI [Entire Talk] - Andrew Ng (AI Fund) Intro to Large Language Models State of GPT Let's build the GPT Tokenizer Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out.
Week 13: 04/01 – 04/07	Presentation for the first coding project and literature review
Week 14: 04/08 – 04/14	Presentation for the first coding project and literature review
The second coding project and its literature review Due; Deadline: 11:59 pm on 04/14
Week 15: 04/15 – 04/21	Presentation for the second coding project and literature review
Week 16: 04/22 – 04/28	Presentation for the second coding project and literature review
Week 17: 04/29 – 05/05	The last day of classes is 04/29. We actually have no classes this week.