RIT Cognitive Science

Syllabus ----- Schedule

COGS-621 Foundations of Scientific Computing: Schedule

Fall Semester 2025 (2251)


RIT Academic Calendar

Disclaimer: We may get ahead of (or fall behind) this schedule, I will try to keep this up to date but regardless, homework topics will follow the actual lecture topic pace.

Week Topics Homework Reading Special Events and Due Dates Slides & Lecture Notes
1 (8/26) Introduction, high-performance research computing (HPC), Python   NP Ch. 1, 2   Slides (1)
2 (9/2+4) Vectors, matrices, arrays   NP Ch. 3   Slides (1), Slides (2), Perceptron Paper
3 (9/9+11) Manipulating tensors ("ndarrays") HW #1 NP Ch. 5   Slides (1), Slides (2)
4 (9/16+18) Guest lecture: Using RIT RC (Viet)   NP Ch. 6   Slides (1), Slides (2)
5 (9/23+25) Linear algebra, numerical optimization Final Project Assigned NP Ch. 6, Ch. 7   Slides (1), Slides (2)
6 (9/30, 10/2) Optimization, interpolation, integration HW #2 NP Ch. 7, Ch. 8   Slides (1), Slides (2)
7 (10/7+9) Ordinary differential equations   NP Ch. 9    
8 (10/16) Differential equations (No class on 10/14, Fall break)   NP Ch. 11   Slides (1), Slides (2)
9 (10/21+23) Guest lecture: Spiking neural networks (William)   NP Ch. 12, Ch. 13    
10 (10/28) Statistical modeling   NP Ch. 13., Ch. 14    
11 (10/30) Statistical modeling HW #3 NP Ch. 14, Ch. 15   Slides (1), Slides (2)
12 (11/4+6) Guest lecture: Predictive coding (Faeze), Bayesian modeling   NP Ch. 16   Slides (1), Slides (2)
13 (11/11+13) XX HW #4      
14 (11/18+20) Guest lecture: Active inference PGMs (Viet)       Slides (1), Slides (2)
15 (11/25) (No class on 11/27, Thanksgiving break)       Slides (1)
16 (12/2+4) Team paper talks, concluding remarks       Slides (1)
16 (12/X) Final Exam - X/X, X:XX-X:XX Final Exam Project      


Updated: August 2, 2025