Schedule

Schedule guidance

Topics may shift with the class’s pace and interests. Review the materials before each meeting. Enrolled students already have slide access through their NC State email, so no access request is needed.

Class date	#	Topics	Mode	Assignments^*
08/17	01	Getting Started: Google Colab and GitHub	In-Person
08/24	02	Tokens and Embeddings	In-Person	Engagement
08/31	03	Text Classification I: Encoder Models	In-Person
09/07		Labor Day	NA
09/14	04	Text Classification II: Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Models	In-Person
09/21	05	Text Classification III: Evaluation and Error Analysis	In-Person	Lab 1
09/28	06	Text Clustering and Topic Modeling	In-Person
10/05	07	RAG I: Dense Retrieval and Grounded Generation	In-Person
10/12	08	RAG II: Evaluation and Improvement	Online
10/19		Fall Break	NA	Topic Brief
10/26		Instructor Travel	NA
11/02	09	Prompt and Context Engineering	In-Person
11/09	10	Evaluating LLM Answers	In-Person
11/16	11	Project Presentation Workshop	In-Person	Lab 2
11/23		Thanksgiving	NA
11/30	12	Project Presentations	In-Person	Project Presentation
12/07		Finals Week	NA	Project Repository

^* Assignments are listed in the week they are due. Check each linked assignment page for the exact due date and time.

Session delivery methods

Use the Mode column to see how each meeting will be held.

In-Person: Meet on campus. A Zoom option is not available.
Remote: Join a live, synchronous class meeting on Zoom.
Online: Complete the session asynchronously using recorded course materials; there is no campus or Zoom meeting.