81610 - Machine Learning

Academic Year 2023/2024

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: Second cycle degree programme (LM) in Computer Science (cod. 5898)

Learning outcomes

Machine learning deals with computer programs that extract features from data, and use them to solve predictive tasks, such as document classification, object recognition, anomaly detection, medical diagnosis, robot control, and so on. These programs, typically improve their performance through experience; they adapt to new tasks, related to previously encountered ones, solving them more efficiently. The course cover traditional topics such as decision tree learning, logistic regression, Bayesian networks and neural networks and introduces the recent field of deep learning.

Course contents

The course is divided into two main sections.

The initial part offers a comprehensive introduction to the field of machine learning, covering its typical forms: supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. It will delve into fundamental topics like decision tree learning, logistic regression, Bayesian networks, and Support Vector Machines.

The second segment of the course focuses specifically on Neural Networks and their prominent learning mechanism, the backpropagation algorithm. Students will explore various types of neural networks, including feedforward, convolutional, and recurrent networks, along with practical applications. Additionally, the course will delve into techniques for visualizing the impact of hidden units, which is closely related to concepts like deep dreams and inceptionism. Furthermore, students will be introduced to modern generative approaches, comprising Diffusion Models. The course will also briefly touch upon thematic topics such as Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Readings/Bibliography

Teacher's slides.

During the course, additional links to relevant documents and sites will be provided.

Teaching methods

Frontal lessons integrated with practical exemplifications

We also foresee additional laboratories held by tutors.

Assessment methods

Individual project on a topic defined by the teacher, possibly integrated by a written quiz.

Teaching tools

The course will make use of several opens source libraries for Machine Learning. In particular we shall mostly use

Office hours

See the website of Andrea Asperti