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.

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 Clustering and Topic Modeling	In-Person	Lab 1
09/28	06	Context Design, Model Benchmarks, and Evaluation	In-Person
10/05	07	RAG I: Dense Retrieval and Grounded Generation	In-Person
10/12	08	RAG II: Hybrid Retrieval, Reranking, and Evaluation	In-Person	Topic Brief
10/19		Fall Break	NA
10/26	09	LLM Workflows, Tool Use, and Agentic RAG	Online
11/02		Instructor Travel	NA	Lab 2
11/09	10	Model Adaptation I: Text Embedding Models	In-Person
11/16	11	Model Adaptation II: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning	In-Person
11/23		Thanksgiving	NA
11/30	12	Project Presentations	In-Person	Project Presentation
12/07		Finals Week	NA	Project Repository

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.