Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning

The following are last-minute news you should be aware of ;-)

14/09/2021: Website under maintenance ... come back later

Course Aim & Organization

Neural networks are mature, flexible, and powerful non-linear data-driven models that have successfully been applied to solve complex tasks in science and engineering. The advent of the deep learning paradigm, i.e., the use of (neural) network to simultaneously learn an optimal data representation and the corresponding model, has further boosted neural networks and the data-driven paradigm.

Nowadays, deep neural network can outperform traditional hand-crafted algorithms, achieving human performance in solving many complex tasks, such as natural language processing, text modeling, gene expression modeling, and image recognition. The course provides a broad introduction to neural networks (NN), starting from the traditional feedforward (FFNN) and recurrent (RNN) neural networks, till the most successful deep-learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memories (LSTM).

The course major goal is to provide students with the theoretical background and the practical skills to understand and use NN, and at the same time become familiar and with Deep Learning for solving complex engineering problems.

Teachers

The course is composed of a blending of lectures and exercises by the course teachers and a teaching assistant.

• Matteo Matteucci: the course teacher and this is his webex room
• Giacomo Boracchi: the course co-teacher and this is his webex room
• Francesco Lattari: the course teaching assistant and this is his webex room
• Eugenio Lomurno: the course teaching assistant and this is his webex room

Course Program and Syllabus

This goal is pursued in the course by:

• Presenting major theoretical results underpinning NN (e.g., universal approx, vanishing/exploding gradient, etc.)
• Describing the most important algorithms for NN training (e.g., backpropagation, adaptive gradient algorithms, etc.)
• Illustrating the best practices on how to successfully train and use these models (e.g., dropout, data augmentation, etc.)
• Providing an overview of the most successful Deep Learning architectures (e.g., CNNs, sparse and dense autoencoder, LSTMs for sequence to sequence learning, etc.)
• Providing an overview of the most successful applications with particular emphasis on models for solving visual recognition tasks.

We have compiled a detailed syllabus of the course student can use to double check their preparation against before the exam.

• [2020/2021] Course Syllabus: a detailed list of topics covered by the course and which students are expected to know when approaching the exam

Detailed course schedule

A detailed schedule of the course can be found here; topics are just indicative while days and teachers are correct up to some last minute change (I will notify you by email). Please note that not all days we have lectures!!

Note: Lecture timetable interpretation
* On Wednesday, in T.2.1, Team 1, starts at 15:15, ends at 17:00
* On Wednesday, in T.2.1, Team 2, starts at 17:30, ends at 19:15
* On Thursday, in teacher webex room, starts at 16:30, ends at 19:15

Note: Teams division is based on your Codice Persona (and should minimize overlap)
* Team 1: odd Codice Persona
* Team 2: even Codice Persona

Date	Day	Time	Room	Teacher	Topic
15/09/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team1 )	Matteo Matteucci	Course Introduction + Deep Learning Intro
15/09/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
16/09/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Introduction to Deep Learning + Introduction to Feed Forward Neural Networks
22/09/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	Python Intro + Numpy
22/09/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
23/09/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Feed forward neural networks and Backpropagation
29/09/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	KERAS: Tensorflow and FNN
29/09/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
30/09/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Error Functions Design (and weight decay)
06/10/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	Matteo Matteucci	Overffitting, cross-validation, and Early Stopping (flipped ?)
06/10/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
07/10/2021	Thursday	---	---	---	No Lectures (Graduation)
13/10/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	KERAS: FFNN and Overfitting
13/10/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
14/10/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Training tricks: activation functions, network initialization, and other stuff...
20/10/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	Giacomo Boracchi	The Image Classification Problem
20/10/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
21/10/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Giacomo Boracchi	Convolutional Neural Networks
27/10/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	KERAS: Convolutional Neural Networks
27/10/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
28/10/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Giacomo Boracchi	Training with data scarsity
03/11/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	KERAS: Convolutional Neural Networks
03/11/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
04/11/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Giacomo Boracchi	Famous CNN architectures
10/11/2021	Wednesday	---	---	---	-- No Lecture (Prove in Itinere) --
11/11/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Giacomo Boracchi	Fully Convolutional CNN, CNN for image segmentation
17/11/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	Giacomo Boracchi	CNN for localization and detction
17/11/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
18/11/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Giacomo Boracchi	GANs
24/11/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	KERAS: Autoencoder, classification, segmentation
24/11/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
25/11/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Recurrent neural networks + LSTM
01/12/2021	Wednesday	15:15 - 17:00	T.2.1 (Team 1)	xxx xxx	KERAS: learning with text
01/12/2021	Wednesday	17:30 - 19:15	T.2.1 (Team 2)
02/12/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Sequence to sequence learning and Word Embedding
08/12/2021	Wednesday	---	---	---	-- No Lecture (Holiday) --
09/12/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	Matteo Matteucci	Attention Mechanism and Transformer
15/12/2021	Wednesday	16:15 - 18:15	Virtual Room	---	-- Spare Lecture --
16/12/2021	Thursday	16:30 - 19:15	Virtual Room	---	-- Spare Lecture --

Course Evaluation

Course evaluation is composed of two parts:

• A written examination covering the whole program graded up to 22/30
• 2 home projects in the form of a "Kaggle style" challenge practicing the topics of the course graded up to 4/30 each

The final score will sum the grade of the written exam and the grade of the home projects. Home projects are not compulsory and they are issued only once a year.

Teaching Material (the textbook)

Lectures will be based on material from different sources, teachers will provide their slides to students as soon they are available. As a general reference you can check the following text, but keep in mind that teachers will not follow it strictly

• Deep Learning. Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, MIT Press, 2016.

The remaining material about the course is available through WeBeep.

Course Slides

Slides from the lectures by Matteo Matteucci

• [2020/2021] Course Introduction: introductory slides of the course with useful information about the course syllabus, grading, and the course logistics.
• [2020/2021] Machine Learning vs Deep Learning: introduction to machine learning paradigms and definition of deep learning with examples
• [2020/2021] From Perceptrons to Feed Forward Neural Networks: the original Perceptron model, Hebbian learning, feed-forward architecture, backpropagation and gradient descent, error functions and maximum likelihood estimation
• [2020/2021] Neural Networks Training: dealing with overfitting (weight decay, early stopping, dropout), vanishing gradient (ReLU and friends), batch normalization
• [2020/2021] Recurrent Neural Networks: learning with sequences, Recurrent Neural Networks, vanishing gradient, Long Short-Term Memories (LSTM), seq2seq model.
• [2020/2021] Word Embedding: neural autoencoders, language models, word embedding, word2vec, glove.
• [2020/2021] Beyond Sequence 2 Sequence Learning: Neural Turing Machines, attention mechanisms, the Transformer.

Slides from the lectures by Giacomo Boracchi are available in his webpage, for you

• Image Classification: Image classification and related issues, template matching, image classification via nearest neighbors methods, image classification via linear classifiers, image classification via hand-crafted features.
• Convolutional Neural Networks: From hand-crafted features to convolutional neural networks.
• Training Convolutional Neural Networks: How to train CNNs, famous architectures, data augmentation, and the like.
• Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Segmentation: CNN architectures for segmentation and detection.

Slides from the practicals by Francesco Lattari

• [2020/2021] Introduction to Keras: Introduction to Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)
• [2020/2021] Facing overfitting in Keras: Techniques to limit overfitting in Keras and Tensorboard use (slides + notebook)
• [2020/2021] Convolutional architectures in Keras: How to build, train, and evaluate convolutional models for image classification in Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)
• [2020/2021] Image Segmentation in Keras: How to build, train, and evaluate convolutional models for image segmentation in Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)
• [2020/2021] Recurrent architectures in Keras: How to build, train, and evaluate recurrent neural architectures in Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)