ECS8060: AI Engineering
Queen's University Belfast
ECS8060
AI Engineering
Queen's University Belfast — Summer 2026

Schedule

This tentative schedule outlines all lectures, labs, and deadlines for project submissions across the course. Materials for each lecture will be posted on Canvas. The schedule is subject to change.

Books

The following books may be helpful resources for the course, but they are not required reading.

Date Topic Readings
Part 1: Building Intelligent Systems
Jun 03 Lecture 1: Introduction to the Course
Readings AIE Chapter 1
AIE Chapter 1
Jun 03 Lecture 2: Understanding How Foundation Models Are Built
Readings AIE Chapter 2
AIE Chapter 2
Jun 10 Lecture 3: Problem Framing, Evaluation, and Model Selection
Readings AIE Chapter 3, 4
AIE Chapter 3, 4
Jun 10 Lecture 4: Prompting and In-Context Learning
Readings AIE Chapter 5
AIE Chapter 5
Jun 17 Lecture 5: Retrieval-Augmented Generation -- RAG
Readings SLP Chapter 11, AIE Ch. 6
SLP Chapter 11, AIE Ch. 6
Jun 17 Lecture 6: Knowledge Retrieval Beyond RAG
Readings AIE Ch. 6
AIE Ch. 6
Jun 24 Lecture 7: Introduction to Multimodal Foundation Models
Jun 24 Guest Lecture - Multimodal AI and Speech Processing by Dr. Hira
Jun 24 Project Proposal Submission
Jul 01 Agentic AI Seminar with AMD
Jul 08 Lecture 8: Agentic AI
Jul 08 Lecture 9: Agentic AI
Jul 15 Self Study — No Lecture
Part 2: Adapting and Deploying Foundational Models
Jul 22 Lecture 10: Why Fine-tune, Memory Math, Instruction Tuning
Jul 22 Lecture 11: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, Distillation
Jul 23 Mid-Project Progress Submission
Jul 29 Lecture 12: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)
Jul 29 Lecture 13: Data Curation for Fine-tuning
Aug 05 Lecture 14: Inference Optimisation
Aug 05 Lecture 15: Building Model APIs
Aug 12 Lecture 16: Building Backend Systems
Aug 12 Lecture 17: Observability and Feedback
Aug 19 Guest Lecture - AI Safety by Dr. Ahmed
Aug 25 Final Project Submission