Fifth Winter School on Deep Learning (WSDL) From Amateur to Connoisseur

Fifth Winter School on Deep Learning (WSDL)

From Amateur to Connoisseur:

A Journey Transforming Perceptrons to Agents

January 16 – March 08, 2026
(Fully Online: Friday, Saturday, Sunday)

Organized By

 Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit (ECSU)
  Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

https://sites.google.com/view/wsdl26

Call for Participation

Program Chair

Swagatam Das

Program Coordinator

Partha Pratim Mohanta

Advisory Committee

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

Bhabatosh Chanda

Dipti Prasad Mukherjee

Naqueeb Ahmad Warsi

Pinakpani Pal

Gautam Paul

Sumana Ghosh

Utpal Garain

Debapriyo Majumdar

Organizing Chairs

Anish Chakrabarty

Faizanuddin Ansari

Kushal Bose

Srinjoy Roy

Priyobrata Mondal

Arghya Pratihar

Administrative Chairs

Aniruddha Mondal

Debanjan Dutta

Arghya Pratihar

Finance Chairs

Dipesh Chanda

Dilip Kumar Gayen

Chandra Sekhar Das

Sourav Chakraborty

Speakers

Professors, Scientists,

Post-docs, and Research Scholars from ISI, other eminent institutions and R&D labs

Organizing Committee

Aniruddha Mandal

Ayanabha Dasgupta

Bhaskar Pramanik

Ganesh Agarwal

Mayank Deora

Pritam Mukherjee

Subhajit Saha

Samujjal Ghosh

Shinjon Chakraborty

Indronil Ojha

External Advisory Committee

Aditya Panda

Avisek Gupta

Bikash Santra

Sankha Subhra Mullick

Shounak Dutta

Susmita Ghosh

Web Chairs

Pritam Mukherjee

Subhajit Saha

Dilip Kumar Gayen

Aniruddha Mandal

The Objective: The Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata is organizing the 5th Winter School on Deep Learning - From Amateur to Connoisseur: A Journey Transforming Perceptrons to Agents. This winter school will focus heavily on developing solutions ranging from basic to advanced real-world challenging problems with main focus on hands-on sessions, in addition to making associated theory easy to understand. Participants will learn from the basics of machine learning to the advanced deep learning-based approaches with application to Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing including Agents. Theoretical lectures will be delivered by renowned professors and scientists (from ISI and other esteemed organizations) who have made significant contributions in their area of research. The lectures will be supplemented by meticulous hands-on sessions instructed by post-docs and research scholars.

Course Coverage: The 5th winter school will have the following course structure (theory & associated hands-on)

  • Basics of Python and Libraries of Importance.
  • Rudiments of Probability Theory for Machine Learning.
  • Basics of Deep Learning Library: PyTorch.
  • Essentials of Matrix Calculus and Linear Algebra for Machine Learning.
  • Bird’s Eye View of Machine Learning.
  • Primer on Text, Video, and Image Data processing.
  • Gradient-based Optimization techniques.
  • Rudiments of Artificial Neural Networks and Backpropagation.
  • Steps towards Deep Learning: Activation, Normalization, Regularization, Loss functions.
  • Convolutional Neural Networks, Architectures of Deep Neural Network Models.
  • Physics Informed Neural Network
  • Generative Deep Neural Network Models: GANs, VAEs, and Diffusion.
  • Recurrent Neural Networks and Backpropagation through Time.
  • Attention Mechanism and Transformers.
  • Introduction to Graph Neural Networks.
  • Introduction to Topological Data Analysis.
  • Explainable and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.
  • Emerging Learning strategies: Contrastive learning, Semi-supervised, zero/few-shot learning, Causal learning, etc.
  • Adversarial Attacks, Defence, and Robust Deep Neural Network Models.
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning.
  • Large Language Models, In-Context Learning, Expressiveness of LLMs.
  • Agentic AI, Prompt Engineering, RAG.
  • LLM Reasoning, Trustworthiness.
  • A Day-Long Real-World Project Implementation.
    • Problem Framing and Goal Definition
    • System Architecture and Agent Design
    • Data Acquisition and Environment Setup
    • Implementation and Workflow Orchestration
    • Testing, Evaluation, and Iterative Improvement
    • Deployment, Ethics, and Future Scalability

Mode of Tutorials: Lectures and Hands-on sessions will be conducted in online mode only. All sessions will be on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and the recordings will be shared with all participants.

Who Can Apply?

Professionals from academia and industry, research/project scholars, masters and final-year bachelors students. Interested candidates must visit the site 

https://sites.google.com/view/wsdl26.

Important Dates:

    Registration Window:              December 03 – December 31, 2025

    Course Duration:                     January 16 – March 08, 2026

For application, registration fees and other details:

https://sites.google.com/view/wsdl26/apply

Contacts:

E-mail: wsdl.ecsu2026@gmail.com

Phone: (+91) 033 2575 2915 (ECSU 912);  (+91) 917003251611 (Shinjon)