Courses Taught by Dr. Riad Sonbol

Generative AI and LLMs (Syrian Private University)

Faculty of Engineering - Artificial Intelligence Engineering

[Last Updated: 2025] This course offers a comprehensive introduction to the principles and techniques behind Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). Students will explore the foundations of modern NLP systems, starting with embeddings and progressing to the transformer architecture that powers today’s most advanced models.

Lectures & Materials

Topics	Title	Description	Download
Topic 1	Introduction to Word Embeddings	Language Models, word2vec, FastText	📥 PDF
Topic 2	Transformers	Intro to BERT, attention mechanism, encoder part, masked attention, cross attention, decoder part	📥 PDF
Topic 3	LLMs in Practice Adapting Foundation Models	Retrieval-augmented generation with LLM, Zero-shot Learning, Few-shot Learning, CoT, Fine-Tuning (Feature extraction, Full fine-tuning, Multi-stage fine-tuning, Adapter fine-tuning) and Domain Adaptation, Self-Supervised	📥 PDF
Topic 4	Practical Concerns for Machine Learning	Generalization, Ensemble Methods, Imbalanced Dataset handling	📥 PDF
Topic 5	Modern Computer Vision Architectures	From CNNs to Transformers	📥 PDF
Topic 6	Video Classification	Late Fusion, Early Fusion, 3D CNN, Two-Stream Networks, I3D	📥 PDF