Principles of AI
BTech First Year Course
NoteCourse Information
Instructor: Prof. Nipun Batra, IIT Gandhinagar
Semester: January 2026
Target: First-year BTech students (no ML background assumed)
Repository: github.com/nipunbatra/principles-ai-teaching
About This Course
A practical introduction to AI and Machine Learning designed for beginners. We build intuition first, then formalize with math and code. By the end, you’ll understand how ChatGPT works and be able to build simple AI systems yourself.
Lectures
| # | Topic | Slides | Key Concepts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is AI? | — | AI landscape, applications, what we’ll build |
| 2 | Data Foundation | HTML ∙ PDF | ML paradigms, features/labels, train/test split, sklearn |
| 3 | Supervised Learning | HTML ∙ PDF | Linear/Logistic regression, trees, KNN, metrics |
| 4 | Model Selection | HTML ∙ PDF | Overfitting, cross-validation, bias-variance |
| 5 | Neural Networks | HTML ∙ PDF | Perceptrons, backprop, PyTorch basics |
| 6 | Computer Vision | HTML ∙ PDF | CNNs, object detection, YOLO |
| 7 | Language Models | HTML ∙ PDF | Next-token prediction, embeddings, attention, transformers |
Labs / Demos
Interactive Jupyter notebooks for hands-on practice.
| Lecture | Notebook | Description |
|---|---|---|
| L02 | L02_data_foundation.ipynb | sklearn API, train/test, clustering |
| L03 | L03_supervised_learning.ipynb | Regression, classification, metrics |
| L04 | L04_model_selection.ipynb | Cross-validation, grid search |
| L05 | L05_neural_networks.ipynb | PyTorch, training loops, MNIST |
| L06 | L06_computer_vision.ipynb | CNNs, YOLO inference |
| L07 | L07_language_models.ipynb | Tokenization, bigrams, embeddings |
Course Project
| Project | Notebook | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Build Your Own LM | PROJECT_simple_slm.ipynb | Train a character-level language model on Shakespeare |
Additional Resources
TipLinks
- Repository: github.com/nipunbatra/principles-ai-teaching
- Run in Colab: All notebooks can be opened directly in Google Colab
Course Materials by Prof. Nipun Batra | IIT Gandhinagar
Last updated: January 2026