Welcome to the UESTC AI Club guide. If you are interested in AI but unsure where to start, we have put together a few projects you can try, along with courses, papers, and tools to help along the way.
Choose a starting point below that fits where you are now. You can come back as questions arise; there is no need to read the guide from beginning to end.
A letter to new university students · University choices, research, life, and the uncertainty of starting out.
Where to start
| Current task | Entry point |
|---|---|
| Run an AI project for the first time | MNIST, YOLO, agents, and robotics |
| Understand the research areas | Research directions |
| Resolve a programming, math, or model concept | Foundations |
| Prepare to join a research project | Getting started: 60 questions |
| Work on a paper or experiment | Reading · Writing and talks |
AI, a history
From Dartmouth to language models, generation, robotics, and scientific discovery: the ideas that changed AI, and how their paths meet.
Getting started with AI
Your first AI project: where to begin?
Train a model to recognize handwritten digits, or detect people and cars in your own photos. Start with MNIST or YOLO and work through running, training, and modifying the code. There are also beginner projects for agents and robotics.
What do different AI research areas study?
Language models, agents, vision, multimodal learning, generation, RL, world models, embodied AI, and systems. Each starts with a question, then connects papers, explanations, and projects.
Which foundations do you need, and how much?
Python, mathematics, ML/DL, computing, and architectures. Learn the concept blocking you, then return to see how it works in your project.
AI terminology and conferences · 中文
Look up unfamiliar terms, browse research topics, and follow related concepts.
Questions that come up during research
Finding and reading papers · Writing, figures, and talks
Contact and collaboration · AI tools
How do you read your first paper, interpret experiment results, or write your first message to a professor? If you are stuck at one of these steps, open the relevant article for examples and approaches you can try.
Follow research developments
Researchers and labs · Technical blogs and research perspectives · Choose a paper
Research communities and knowledge sharing
OpenEnvision
OpenEnvision (OE) is an open AI research community connecting academia and industry, with interests in world models, multimodal intelligence, vision, and embodied AI. It also shares research knowledge through curated writing, interviews, and courses.
- BlogrXiv: AI research blogs and technical writing brings together research blogs, lab essays, and technical notes. Browse by field for explanations, engineering experience, and research methods, then follow links to the original articles.
- ScholarTube: AI interviews, podcasts, and courses collects long-form researcher interviews, video podcasts, complete courses, and research talks across agents, world models, vision, robotics, and research practice, with links to the original videos.
You can also recommend articles and videos to BlogrXiv and ScholarTube.
Lumina
Lumina brings together embodied AI research, open projects and community events. Its Embodied AI Guide organizes the field’s learning resources; Talks, research coverage and events on the website introduce the people and projects behind the work.
AgentHub
AgentHub collects discussions from the Agent community into daily and weekly digests, covering agent research, tools, engineering practice and industry developments. Browse by date, discussion group or external news to see what people are working through, how they compare technical approaches and where their views differ.
Resource index
Looking for a course, a paper list, or a different explanation of something you are learning? Browse the resource index, where we have grouped materials by topic. If you already know what you need, open the search box and enter a course name, a paper keyword, or your question.