In the autumn semester of 2017/2018, our group hosted a course on Neural Networks. The head of our group, data science professor Raul Vicente took care of most of the lectures. Teaching assistants Ardi and Tambet did the heavy lifting of creating a set of homework tasks and then correcting the 50+ submissions every week. The videos of the lectures are available in UTTV (see the links in here).
Half-way through the semester the homeworks were concluded and students picked topics for their course projects. A very diverse set of topics were proposed by the teaching staff, but many of the students also chose to work on their own ideas. Overall, we were very impressed with the quality of the projects – students had chosen complicated topics ( reinforcement learning, music generation, poem generation, adversarial examples, …) and came up with highly advanced architectures to tackle the tasks. In a few days, we will publish a follow-up post about the coolest projects of the course.
FEEDBACK
Despite this being the first time this course was held, the students highly appreciated the course. In the Study Information System 38 students out of possible 53 gave their opinion about the course. The students marked the course with an average of 4.84 / 5 points, which places the course among the top courses in the institute. In particular, students judged the materials to be highly relevant to the topic, they appreciated the feedback and they believe they achieved the goals set out before the course.
We thank all students for their participation. There were very many highly motivated students who were fascinated by the topic and inspired us to make the course even better. We are sure that thanks to what we learned from you the course will be even better next year.