I will be following the book quite closely, with the exception of the addition of some material about biological neural networks. Some reading will be assigned from An Introduction to Neural Networks, by James Anderson, MIT Press, which will be on reserve in the library. Additional reading will be taken from a manuscript Differential Equations for Neuroscientists , by Hugh R. Wilson. These will be handed out later in the course. Instead of the final, you may propose an implementation project provided you do so before April 1.
Exercises are extremely important.
Doing them is the way you will cement material which will represent a quite different way of solving computational problems than you have seen before. However, if Matlab is not available to you, feel free to use any convenient programming environment. A tentative syllabus is here . It is rather ambitious and we may find we have to stretch it out and eliminate some of the material at the end of the course. Exercises for the later part of the course will be specified shortly.