The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will continue its Seminar Series on Friday, March 27, 2026, from 12:45-1:45 pm via Zoom, featuring guest speaker Shuai Zhang, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His talk, titled “Towards Theoretical Foundations of Foundation Models: Feature Learning, Optimization Dynamics, and Generalization,” is open to everyone at Illinois Tech.

Dr. Zhang will talk about how Foundation models have rapidly become a central paradigm in modern AI, driving breakthroughs across language, vision, and multimodal learning. Despite their empirical success, many fundamental questions remain, including why these large-scale neural networks learn effective representations and why they generalize well despite extreme overparameterization. This talk discusses recent theoretical progress toward understanding foundation models within the feature learning framework.

For more information regarding this seminar, please contact the ECE department at 312.567.3400. or ece@illinoistech.edu.