Abtin Shahidi Astrophysics · Data Science Download CV
Teaching

Foundations of applied
machine learning.

I've taught physics, astrophysics and machine learning at UC Riverside since 2016. The centerpiece is a graduate course I built from the ground up — theory, statistics, and the algorithms behind modern ML, taught through runnable notebooks.

Graduate course · UC Riverside

The Foundation of Applied Machine Learning

Machine learning as building automated methods that improve through learning patterns in data — then using those patterns to predict and decide. The course covers the theory and the practical algorithms from several perspectives, with Python from day one. Offered Spring & Summer 2019 for Prof. Bahram Mobasher.

Syllabus Timetable Course repo

Weekly notebooks — open on GitHub

Wk 1Python 3Wk 2StatisticsWk 3More statistics + Monte CarloWk 4Confidence intervalsWk 5Clustering & classificationWk 6Regression, gradient descent, treesWk 7Random forests & SVMs

Lecture slides

L01Lecture 1L02Lecture 2L03Lecture 3L04Lecture 4L05Lecture 5L06Lecture 6L07Lecture 7L08Lecture 8L09Lecture 9L10Lecture 10L11Lecture 11L12Lecture 12L13Lecture 13L14Lecture 14L15Lecture 15L16Lecture 16L17Lecture 17L18Lecture 18

Reference cheatsheets

PDFnumpyPDFpandasPDFmatplotlibPDFbokehPDFlinear algebraPDFnotebookPDFdata
Also taught

Courses & mentoring.

Physics & astrophysics

Teaching assistant at UC Riverside (2016–2021) for Introductory Physics & Laboratory and Interstellar Astrophysics.

Applied ML

Teaching assistant and instructor for the Foundation of Applied Machine Learning graduate course.

Olympiad coaching

Coached high-school students for the physics and astronomy olympiads (2012–2016) — mechanics, relativity, orbital mechanics, thermodynamics, cosmology.