Presidency School of Computer Science & Engineering successfully organised a 10-day FDP titled "Next-Gen Intelligence: From Machine Learning to Generative Agents" from July 14 to 25, 2025. The FDP aimed to deepen the understanding of advanced AI tools and techniques among faculty and researchers, enabling them to adopt, teach, and apply next-generation AI systems in academic and applied research settings. 

The key speakers were Dr. Preeth, Assistant Professor at IIITDM Kancheepuram, Dr. R. Nidhya, Professor at Madanapalle Institute of Technology & Science. Dr. D. Pavithra, Associate Professor at Dr. NGP Institute of Technology, Coimbatore; Mr. Gajendra Deshpande, Principal Guardian of Secure Futures at Theta Dynamics Pvt. Ltd, Karnataka; Mr. Samuel Katapur, R&D Engineer at Synopsys, Bangalore; Dr. P. Karthikeyan, Associate Professor and Centre Head at CARA, RV University; Mr Raghu Prasad K. S., CEO of Kaushalya Technologies; and Dr. Saif Abrar, Advisory Systems Engineer at IBM.  

The 10 day sessions covered Core areas such as Machine Learning (types of learning, model training/testing, Scikit-learn, Pandas, regression, decision trees, clustering, evaluation metrics), Deep Learning (neural networks, backpropagation, optimizers, CNNs, transfer learning, TensorFlow, Keras), RNNs and LSTMs (applications in speech, text, sequence modeling), Reinforcement Learning (agents, policies, Q-learning, MDPs, DQN, OpenAI Gym), NLP (embeddings, transformers, BERT, GPT, NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face), XAI (LIME, SHAP, Grad-CAM, TCAV), Responsible AI (fairness, bias, legal frameworks, AIF360, What-If Tool), Generative & Agentic AI (ChatGPT, DALL·E, Copilot, diffusion models, REDDI, AI tutors), and AI Agents (PEAS, multi-agent systems, robotics, simulators).  

The FDP provided participants with conceptual clarity and hands-on expertise in advanced AI fields like deep learning, reinforcement learning, NLP, XAI, and generative AI, while emphasising ethical practices to prepare them for innovation and leadership in the evolving AI landscape.