IMSE 774 — Neural Networks

North Dakota State University · Fall 2026

Welcome to IMSE 774. This site hosts the syllabus, schedule, and lecture notes for the course. Everything here is generated from the course repository and is available as both a web page and a downloadable PDF.

Meeting

Tuesday & Thursday
12:30–1:45 p.m.
Room TBA

August 25 – December 10, 2026

Instructor

Harun Pirim, PhD
Offerdahl 106
harun.pirim@ndsu.edu
(701) 231-7285

Textbook

Simon J. D. Prince,
Understanding Deep Learning,
MIT Press, 2024.

Free from the author

Start Here

  • Syllabus — grading, policies, and key dates
  • Schedule — week-by-week topics and readings
  • Lecture notes — one page per topic, with runnable code and a Colab notebook
  • Course flyer — one page to print, post, or forward to a colleague

What This Course Covers

We work through Understanding Deep Learning from the ground up: shallow and deep networks, how they are trained, how to tell whether they work, and then the architectures that define the modern field — convolutional networks, transformers and language models, graph neural networks, and generative models including VAEs, GANs, and diffusion.

Every topic pairs the mathematics with a working PyTorch implementation. You will finish the semester having built and evaluated a deep learning system on a problem you chose yourself.

Assessment at a Glance

Component Weight Notes
Assignments 30% Roughly weekly, submitted as notebooks
Midterm exam 20% In class, multiple choice, Thursday, October 22
Presentation 20% Recent paper, December 3 / 8 / 10
Project 30% Final report due Monday, December 14

Software Setup

All coursework uses Python with PyTorch. You have two options.

Google Colab — nothing to install, works in the browser, free GPUs. This is fine for every assignment in the course. Each lecture note carries an Open in Colab link to a notebook holding all of that week’s code.

Local install — clone the repository and create an environment:

git clone https://github.com/harunpirim/IMSE774-NeuralNetworks.git
cd IMSE774-NeuralNetworks
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Found an error in the notes? Please open an issue — corrections are welcome and appreciated.

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