NMEP Spring 2026
Welcome everyone! In the New Member Education Program (NMEP), we’ll be paving a sturdy ML foundation for you - from classical ML to reinforcement learning. Come hungry to learn and get to know the rest of your class!
Your instructor this semester is Surya Krishnapillai!
Schedule
| Week | Date | Lecture | Assignments | Lecturer(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Feb 9 | Introduction + Math Review (slides) | Lecture Exercise Rockfall Homework 1 (due Feb 23) Math NumPy PyTorch | Surya |
| 2 | Feb 16 | Classical Machine Learning (slides) (notes) | Surya | |
| 3 | Feb 23 | Deep Learning (slides) (notes) | Reading How to read a paper Homework 2 (due March 2) Word Embeddings Micrograd | Surya |
| 4 | March 2 | Computer Vision (slides) (notes) | Lecture Exercise YOLO Homework 3 (due March 16) Model Zhu | Tim, Andrew |
| 5 | March 9 | NLP + Transformers (slides) (notes) | NMEP Midterm (March 15) | Surya, Saathvik |
| 6 | March 16 | Large Language Models (slides) | Homework 4 (due April 6) Transformers | Tejas |
| 7 | March 30 | SSL + Generative Models (slides) (slides part 2) | Final Project Kickoff | Surya, Aakarsh |
| 8 | Apr 6 | Reinforcement Learning (slides) | Final Project Proposal Due Homework 5 (due April 13) Diffusion OR RL (Credit: CS 185) | Kavish, Tanmayi |
| 9 | Apr 13 | 3D Computer Vision + World Models | Tim, Andrew, Rishi | |
| 10 | Apr 20 | AI Safety + Conclusion | Final Project Checkpoint Due | Prakrat |
| 11 | May 1 (7-9 PM) | Final Project Showcase | Final Project Due |