CMPSC 291A (William Wang): Deep Learning

Deep learning has revolutionized many areas within AI, and it is on track to fundamentally transform many other industries. DeepMind's AlphaGo combined convolutional neural networks together with deep reinforcement learning and MCTS, and won many games against top human Go players. In computer vision, most of the leading systems in ImageNet competitions are based on deep neural networks. Deep learning has also changed the game in NLP: for example, Google has recently replaced their phrase-based machine translation system with a neural machine translation system, as well as their search engine with BERT. Throughout the quarter, we will go over some of the basics in neural networks, and we will also go through the deep learning revolution after 2006. In this graduate class, we will also emphasize on the development of graduate student's paper reading and presentation abilities: each student will need to present research papers related to this topic. Last but not least, the most important aspect of this course is for students to work on a novel research project in open problems related to deep learning, and gain hands-on experiences of doing cutting-edge research.