Reaching a More Profound Understanding of AI Research with HKU IDS:
Summer Course IDSS 2402 “Towards AI by Deep Neural Networks”
Organized by HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science and supported by the HKU Summer Institute, the Institute, together with two of our faculty members, successfully concluded the 2-week summer programme IDSS2402 – Towards AI by Deep Neural Networks, between July 23 and August 2, 2024! An academically intensive and thought-provoking learning journey with our HKU IDS Director & Professor, Chair of Artificial Intelligence, Professor Yi Ma (HKU IDS / Department of Computer Science) & Professor Yanchao Yang (HKU IDS / Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering). Students, divided into 8 groups in accordance with their academic backgrounds, enjoyed the exploration of intelligence and machine learning through studying the latest publicatins and working on technical projects of programming and experiments.
According to the course evaluation survey, over 85% of the respondents agreed that the course instructors “were always well prepared for the class”, and that 90% in total of the participants either “strongly agreed”, or “agreed” that the lectures and course assignments in IDSS 2042 complemented each other well.
Students (94% of respondents) further responded that IDSS 2402 was “well-organized in a manner that helped [them] understand the underlying concepts”, revealing the fundamental importance of learning the different components of AI from its definition.
The course instructors have been positively fed back as having carefully designed their course materials, as they remarked that “lecture topics were insightful and topical”, and our professors delved into the topics of AI and robotics in a “comprehensive and coherent manner”. Despite being a 2-week summer programme, the course was “challenging” and “quite complicated”.
Our HKU IDS course instructors, who were complimented as “excellent teachers”, “clear presenters”, and “professional researchers”, gave HKU IDS every encouragement to offering more interactive and high-quality courses to not only undergraduate students in summer, but also potential members to our research community through the research postgraduate programme. Just as how popularly received our first summer institute course, IDSS2401: Data Science for Societies, this second course IDSS 2402 also went a step further into exploring and rendering a high-level understanding of deep neural networks, high dimensional data analysis, embodied AI, and deep learning. All our IDSS 2402 students, so as the eight helpful teaching assistants who are PhD candidates and young researchers from our HKU IDS community, deserved a huge round of applause for their outstanding performances at the group presentations at the end of the course.
Cheers to all who have devoted their sweats and laughters into the intensive HKUSI summer programmes organized by HKU IDS, and we sincerely hope that these have been eye-opening journeys for you to take on as you sail into the world of data science studies.
