Instructor: Upinder Bhalla
Duration of the course:
1st Feb 2026 to 31st May 2026
Credits: 3
Course Outline:

Syllabus Course : AI for Good and Evil

Reading

AI for beginners: https://microsoft.github.io/AI-For-Beginners/

Dmitry Soshnikov.

http://www.bioinf.jku.at/publications/older/2604.pdf

Hochreiter and Schmidhuber 1997.

https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/

https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/course/2022/lecture-7-foundation-models

Attention is all you need: Vaswani et al 2017

Course outline:

AI basics

AI practicalities: Using Llama, ChatGPT, Copilot, Bing, Claude, Gemini and others.

        AI inference engine installation

 

AI and text

        Generation

        Digestion

        Hallucination

        Citation

        Literature surveys

        Legalities

 

AI and code

        Generation

                Code graphics, analysis, and visualization

        Checking

        Garbage in, garbage out.

 

Prompt engineering

 

Making a web page with AI

 

AI and graphics

        Scientific illustration

        Image manipulation. Fakes.

        Is it art?

 

AI and sound

        Sound manipulation basics

        Speech synthesis

        Music. Is it art?

AI and science

        Alpha fold

        DeepLabCut and SLEAP

        Perch

                Classifiers

        Is it science?

 

Build an AI

        Train it

        Validate it

        Break it

        Inference engine

 

AI concepts and where they fit in training, deploying, and generating.

Engrams

Perceptrons

RNNs

CNNs

Diffusion

Generator

Generative adversarial networks

Variational autoencoders

LSTM

Foundation models and LLMs

Embedding

Transformers and GPTs

Course Outcomes

After completing this course, the student will be able to:

CO1

Understand basic AI principles

CO2

Use AIs effectively for academic and research purposes

CO3

Be familiar with flaws, limitations, ethical and legal drawbacks of AIs

 

Course Term: Jan Term - 2026
Course Year: 2026/2027
Course Code: BIO-136.6