Master's Degree in Data Science (2024-2025)

For the previous year (2023-2024), refer to this page.

Important Info

Material: slides, assignments, and grading will be done via Google Classroom.
Timetable: Wednesday 5-7 PM (Aule A5 + streaming in A6, Via Ariosto), Friday 8-11 (Aule A5 + streaming in A6, Via Ariosto).

News

General overview

The course provides a general overview on neural networks as compositions of differentiable blocks, that are optimized numerically. We describe common building blocks including convolutions, self-attention, batch normalization, etc., with a focus on image, audio, and graph domains. The course combines rigorous mathematical descriptions with many coding sessions in TensorFlow.

More information about the topics, the exam, organization, etc. can be found on the introductory slides.

Teaching assistants

Jary Pomponi
Jary Pomponi (post-doc)
Francesco Verdini
Francesco Verdini (PhD student)
Donatella Genovese
Donatella Genovese (PhD student)

Material

Lab sessions implemented in JAX are in blue. Homeworks and projects (mandatory) are in red. Seminars (optional) are in green.

  Date Content Material
L0 25/09 About the course Slides
L1 25/09 Introduction Slides
L2 27/09 Preliminaries Slides
Video (1/2)
Video (2/2)
L3 02/10, 04/10 Supervised learning Slides
Video (1/2)
Video (2/2)
- - The deep learning software ecosystem Slides
E1 09/10, 11/10 Lab 1: logistic regression in JAX Notebook
L4 16/10 Fully-connected models Slides
Video (1/2)
Video (2/2)
- 05/11 Interpretability for Language Models: Current Trends and Applications (Gabriele Sarti, University of Groningen) Webpage
- 07/11 Towards interpretability-by-design (Pietro Barbiero, USI) Webpage
L5 TBD Automatic differentiation Slides
- 11/11 A Journey into PyTorch, the Ecosystem, and Deep Learning Compilers (Luca Antiga, CTO, Lightning AI) Webpage
L6 TBD Convolutional layers Slides

Book: Alice’s Adventures in a Differentiable Wonderland

The course is complemented by a book which expands on most topics covered during the lectures:

  • Buy the book on Amazon (independently published to keep the price low).
  • Downloaded the updated full draft (08/07/2024).

For the full book webpage (with arXiv version and errata list): https://sscardapane.it/alice-book/