Special Events and Conferences

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a central role in the 4^th industrial revolution.  An important part of AI is to extract meaningful knowledge from data to solve real-world problems.  In the last few years, artificial neural networks, re-born as deep learning, have overcome all other techniques in competition to analyze large-scale datasets, a.k.a. big data, and solve complex tasks just as humans do.

Deep learning technology has allowed the emergence of self-driving vehicles and shortly autonomous robots.  It has also developed a program which defeats the world champions of Go for the first time in history.  Deep learning has improved significantly speech recognition, which is about to reach the human achievement level.  Machine language translation was also significantly enhanced with deep learning, and chatbots are now powerful entities that can understand questions and offer meaningful answers.  In healthcare, this technology offers a great potential to develop our understanding of brain neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimer and produce new patient-personalized drugs.

Major IT companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple etc. have started their transition to become AI companies.  Soon all products will be powered by deep learning techniques.

Overview

Deep learning is a fascinating paradox.  On one hand, these techniques can solve very complex tasks by extracting highly abstract concepts from data.  On the other hand, deep learning algorithms do not require highly technical level and can be accessible to virtually anyone.  In other words, the mathematics behind deep learning techniques is simple to master and the coding of these algorithms remains effortless with Python.

The purpose of this course is to give the participants a clear introduction, an intuitive understanding and a smooth Python implementation of the most successful deep learning techniques.  The teaching approach provides a good balance of theory and practice.  Theory of deep neural networks relies on simple linear operations and basic gradient descent optimization.  Practical exercises of deep learning applications focus on PyTorch, the library developed by Facebook AI.  Each lecture presents the fundamental concepts and translates them into PyTorch implementations.

The course is centered on three classes of neural networks that encompass 95% of available deep learning applications; fully connected neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks.  Commercial applications of these neural networks will be covered.

Objectives of the course

• Embrace the context of Deep Learning revolution – The Why?
• Learn the most important neural network architectures
• Assimilate in a clear, solid and intuitive manner neural network algorithms
• Implement neural networks with Python notebooks
• Understand IT leading companies’ industrial applications of Deep Learning

Target Audience

Anyone who wants to get started in deep learning, apply deep learning to their projects, learn how to code deep learning algorithms, and upgrade their skills to the latest AI algorithms.

Prerequisite

Basic knowledge of linear algebra (e.g. matrix multiplication) and script programming (e.g. Python, Matlab, R) are needed.  The coding will be done in Python. Participants must bring their laptop to run the Python notebooks (no Python installation required as the notebooks run on the Cloud).

Materials

The course materials, slides and Python notebooks, will be available one week before the course starts.