A Dive into Deep Learning

The School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad and IEEE Hyderabad Section organised a one-day symposium titled, "A Dive into Deep Learning", on 5 July 2023. Prof. Mohd. J. Zaki, Professor and Head, Dept. of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute delivered a series of talks on the latest topics in Deep Learning. The first talk introduced the audience to Transformers, the second covered Large Language Models, BERT, ChatGPT, etc. The third, in the post-lunch session, took the audience to the very latest ideas such as Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, etc. The session started with introduction to Variational Autoencoders and moved on to how diffusion models today are beginning to provide spectacular results in image generation. The talks also included code snippets and toy-demos to practically show the audience how easy it is to build even the latest models.

The event, in hybrid mode, is a big success with nearly 100 participants in person and another hundred on-line. The audience, comprising mainly students and research scholars, were thrilled by the lucidity of the presentations without sacrificing the technical details and the effortless ease with which the speaker navigated through these advanced topics. The audience had a grand time interacting with Prof. Zaki during the breaks and in the evening after the event formally concluded.

The School wishes to thank IEEE for helping in the organisation of such a wonderful symposium.

A comment in the chat column from one of the online attendees succinctly says it all: "Wonderful deep dive into the deep end of the DL pool. Thanks to the speaker."

Thank you, Prof. Zaki!