Neuromatch Academy
When I was about one year in my PhD and COVID-19 hit the world, I came across the Neuromatch Academy summer school. The concept at that time was completely new to me, a summer school that is completely online.
We have to distinguish between two different concepts of using the resources of the Neuromatch Academy. The first one is the Neuromatch Academy summer school, which is a three-week-long intensive summer school that is completely online once a year, but with lectures, tutorials and projects. The second one is the completely free material that is available all year round on the website.
Neuromatch Academy Summer School
I attended the summer school in 2021, and it was a great experience. The lectures were well-prepared and the organization for such a big event was amazing. I would split the summer school into three parts: lectures, tutorials and projects. In the beginning you will be assigned a lecture group and a tutor. The tutor will guide you through the three weeks and help you with the tutorials. You will also have a project group, which you will work with on a project and the projects have their own tutors. You would mostly stick with the people in your lecture group (I think it was around 20 people). For the lectures and tutorials the lecture group was split even further into smaller study groups of around 5 people. Study groups were reassigned every day.
Lectures were mostly pre-recorded, and you would watch them together in your study group and discuss the content. Afterward, you would start working on the tutorials. The tutorials were mostly jupyter notebooks with left out code snippets that you had to fill in. The lecture group tutor would be available at all time to help you with the tutorials. Twice a day, the complete lecture group would gather in a zoom call and the tutor would go over general questions. Only on a few days you would actually work on your project with your project group. In our project we used reinforcement learning to train an agent to play the Lunar Lander game. The project group tutor would be available to help you with that.
For me at that time, the summer school did not really teach me anything new, but it was a great experience to meet people from all over the world and to work with them on a project. I would recommend it especially to everyone who is just starting out with neural networks and deep learning.
Neuromatch Academy Material
The material from the summer school is available for free on the website. It is a great resource for everyone who wants to learn about neural networks and deep learning. To go over it yourself, plan around 3-4 weeks (spending 6 hours a day) to go through all the material. It is a lot of material, but you will not get any better overview of the field in such a short time.
I recommend the material to everyone who asks me how to get started with neural networks and deep learning!
Go to Neuromatch Academy material More about Neuromatch Academy