Advanced Automation (2024/25)

1st year MEM, 1st semester 2nd quarter

Course Meeting Times

Practical: 1 session/week, 2 hours/session

Laboratory: 4 sessions, 1.5 hours/session (Weeks 2, 4) and 2 hours/session, (Weeks 5, 6)

A list of topics covered in the course is presented in the calendar. Bring your laptop to the
practical and laboratory classes.

Description
This introductory course gives an overview of many concepts, techniques, and algorithms in
machine learning, beginning with topics such as classification and linear regression and ending
up with more recent topics such as boosting or support vector machines. The course will give the
student the basic ideas and intuition behind modern machine learning methods as well as a bit
more formal understanding of how, why, and when they work. The underlying theme in the
course is statistical inference, as it provides the foundation for most of the methods covered.

Assignments
There will be a total of 2 assignments totalizing 10% of your final grade (5% + 5%), due in the end
of week 4 and week 6, respectively. The content of the assignments will vary from theoretical
questions to more applied problems and laboratory assignment. The assignments will be worked
in groups of 3 students. You are encouraged to collaborate with other students while solving the
problems, but when submitting the report, you must specify the contributors of each exercise.
Copying will not be tolerated. If you collaborate, you must indicate all your collaborators.

Each problem set will be graded with the possible following grades: {0, 5, 10, 15, 20} and
individual members of each group may have different grades.

The class assignments as well as the class project will be delivered through the fenix system in
pdf format and all the content (reports, Jupyter notebooks, coding, data, etc…) should be
delivered in GitHub by indicating in your pdf report the link to the respective GitHub.
Exams
There will be one final exam with two dates; check these dates in the fenix system.

Project
You are required to complete a class project totalizing 40% of your final grade. The choice of the
topic is up to you so long as it clearly pertains to the course material. To ensure that you are on
the right track, you will have to submit a one paragraph description of your project until week 5.
Similarly, to problem sets, you are encouraged to collaborate on the project. We expect a
maximum 10 pages write-up about the project, which should clearly and succinctly describe the
project goal, methods, and your results. Each group should submit only one copy of the write-up
and include all the names of the group members. The projects will be graded based on your
understanding of the overall course material (not based on, e.g., how brilliantly your method
works).

The class project will be worked in groups of 3 students. You are encouraged to collaborate with
other students while solving the problems, but when submitting the report, you must specify the
contributors of each part of the project. Copying will not be tolerated. If you collaborate, you
must indicate all your collaborators.

The class project will be graded with the possible following grades: [0, 20] and individual
members of each group may have different grades.

The projects can focus on four different types: 1) Data Analysis; 2) Monitoring; 3) Hardware; 4)
Databases. In all the project types, data analysis methods will be required, but depending on the
type you/your group wish to pursue, different aspects can be considered. The projects can be
theoretical derivations or analyses, applications of machine learning methods to problems you
are interested in, or something else (to be discussed with the course staff). Examples of the four
types of projects will be presented in class.

The projects are due in Week 7. Electronic submission is required for both class assignments as
well as class projects, through the fenix system in pdf format and all the content (reports, Jupyter
notebooks, coding, data, etc…) should be delivered in GitHub by indicating in your pdf report the
link to the respective GitHub.
Grading
Your overall grade will be determined as follows:

ACTIVITIES PERCENTAGES

• Problem sets: 10%

• Project: 40%

• Final exam: 50%

Textbooks
There are several useful texts for this course, but each cover only some part of the class material.

• Hastie, T., R. Tibshirani, and J. H. Friedman. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining,
Inference and Prediction. New York, NY: Springer, 2001. ISBN: 9780387952840.
• G. James, D. Witten, T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, J. Taylor. An Introduction to Statistical Learning
with Applications in Python, Springer, July 2023.
• Christopher M. Bishop. Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Springer, 2006.
• Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H. Fundamentals of Business Process
Management. Springer, 2018.
• Alok M. Tripathi. Learning Robotic Process Automation: Create Software Robots and
Automate Business Processes with the Leading RPA Tool – UiPath, Packt Publications, 2018.
• M. Berthold, C. Borgelt, F. Höppner and F. Klawonn. Guide to Intelligent Data Analysis: How
to Intelligently Make Sense of Real Data. Series: Texts in Computer Science. Springer, 2010.
• Duda, Richard, Peter Hart, and David Stork. Pattern Classification. 2nd ed. New York, NY:
Wiley-Interscience, 2000. ISBN: 9780471056690.
• MacKay, David. Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780521642989. Available on-line here.
• Mitchell, Tom. Machine Learning. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1997. ISBN: 9780070428072.

You are responsible for the material covered in lectures (most of which will appear in lecture
notes in some form), problem sets, as well as material specifically made available and indicated
for this purpose. The weekly recitations/tutorials will be helpful to understand the material and
solving the homework problems.
Tentative Calendar
LEC # TOPICS Labs KEY DATES
W1 L1 Introduction and course overview. Statistical learning.
W2 L2 Linear Regression GitHub
W2 L3 Classification
W3 L4 Resampling methods; Cross-validation.
W3 L5 Subset selection; Regularization.
W4 L6 Splines, Generalized Additive Models. Cloud computing
W4 L7 Tree-based Methods, Bagging. Random Forests. Google Colab 1st assignment
W5 L8 Boosting. Support Vector Machines DataBases and
W5 L9 Neural Networks. Multi-layer perceptron. Backpropagation. SQL query
W6 L10 Convolutional Neural Networks. Deep Learning. Implementation
W6 L11 Unsupervised Learning: PCA, Clustering. in Arduino 2nd assignment
W7 L12 Business Process Management.
W7 L13 Robotic Process Automation. Final Project
W8 Exam preparation
W9 Exam See fenix