Course Description


This three-week summer program offers a unique opportunity for Penn State undergraduates to study deep learning and to fulfill a 400-level math course requirement for Math Majors/Minors (or for other Majors as approved by student advisor) while studying alongside local students at the world-renowned Peking University in Beijing, China. This is an advanced undergraduate course on the introduction of basic mathematical and practical aspects of deep learning techniques. The course will cover some basic deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks, training algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent methods, popular data bases such as MNIST and CIFAR and specific applications such as image classifications. Examples of other successful applications of deep learning will also be briefly discussed for various tasks of machine learning and artificial intelligence such as computer vision, natural language processing and reinforcement learning. More specifically, the following topics will be covered:

  • Basics of machine learning, logistic regression
  • Deep neural networks and mathematical properties
  • Multigrid methods and convolutional neural networks
  • Stochastic gradient descent methods
  • PyTorch and deep learning for image classification
  • Other applications

    • The course will be held at Peking University during July 5 - July 25, 2020. Lectures hours will be given 8:30am-10:30am and 2:00pm-3:00pm and Q&A sessions will be 10:30am-11:30am every weekday. Students are expected to practice and do assignments during the afternoon sessions. Typed lecture notes will be distributed in class. Both math and computing homework problems will be assigned. We will have quizzes in the first two weeks and final project. This course was also offerred in 2019 summer, for details and student experiences, see 2019 Education Abroad at Peking University: Math497 . The whole program fee can be found here .

      Course Lecturers


  • Main Lecturer: Prof. Jinchao Xu (Penn State University)
  • Guest Lecturer: Prof. Zhanxing Zhu (Peking University)



      • Teaching Assistants


  • Juncai He (Penn State University)
  • Li Jiang (Peking University)
  • Lian Zhang (Penn State University)


      • Course Details


  • Information and Sholarships at Eberly College of Science: An Introduction to Deep Learning
  • Three weeks for 3 credits: July 5 - July 25, 2020
  • Time: Lecture houre: 8:30am-10:30am and 2:00pm-3:00pm; Q&A sessions: 10:30am-11:30am; Free discussion: 3:00pm-4:00pm
  • Place: Peking University, Beijing China
  • Staff Assistant: Shenglan Zhao (slzhao@pku.edu.cn)
  • For a detailed timetable of the course, see Timetable







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