CSC 7700: Foundational AI

Advanced overview of foundational AI models trained on large, diverse datasets. Emphasis on the theory, design, training, and deployment of sequential deep learning models (including LLMs). Topics include recurrent neural networks, transformers, and structured state space models; pretraining and fine-tuning; quantization and low‑rank adaptation; multimodal representation learning; benchmarking and evaluation. Concludes with emerging low‑power and stateful neural paradigms, including neuromorphic computing.