CS 175: Project in Artificial Intelligence, Winter 2026

General Information

• Lecture Times: Monday and Wednesday, 5:00pm to 6:20pm
• Location: ICS 174
• Instructor: Professor Padhraic Smyth, Office Hours: Thursdays, 5 to 6:30pm, DBH 4216 (for the first few weeks)
• Teaching Assistants:
  • Coen Adler: office hours to be announced
  • Catarina Belem: office hours to be announced
  • Saatvik Kher: office hours to be announced
• Discussion Section: SSL 248, Fridays 1 to 1:50pm
• Weekly Schedule
• Lecture Slides: will be available online via Canvas after each lecture
• Project Resources
  • Reference Text: Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed draft) by Dan Jurafsky and James Martin.
  • Ideas for Project Topics
• Questions? Please use the Ed discussion board (accessible via Canvas) for all of your questions for the instructor or TAs. Please do not use email. Ed is your first option for asking questions outside of class or office hours. Please also feel free on Ed to answer other students' clarification questions about assignments, to initiate discussions on project-related topics, etc. To communicate directly with only the instructor and/or TA you can send a private message to them within Ed.

Course Description

Students in this project class will work in teams to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms with a particular focus on natural language and text analysis, using natural language processing, machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). Topics for projects can include, for example, document classification and topic analysis, sentiment analysis, summarization, dialog/chatbot systems, information extraction, question-answering systems, retrieval-augmented LLM text generation, analysis of bias in LLM output, code generation with LLMs, agentic AI, and more. Projects can make use of real-world publicly-available data from sources such as Yelp, Wikipedia, Reddit, news articles, product and movie reviews, email data sets, the US patent database, and more.
Note: this offering of CS 175 will focus on text/natural-language aspects of AI. If you are interested in other topics (e.g., game-playing agents, computer vision, etc) you may want to take a different offering of this course, e.g., this quarter as offered by Prof. Roy Fox or a future quarter.

Assignments, Project Reports, and Project Updates

There will be 2 individual assignments in the first 2 weeks of the course and then a series of regular project reports and meetings (by project team) for the rest of the quarter. Assignments will be posted and submitted via Canvas.

Grading Policy

A weighted combination of Assignments 1 and 2 (10% each, individual grades), project proposal (15%, team-based), progress report (15%, team-based), weekly updates (20%, individual grades), in-class presentation (5%, team-based), and final report (25%, team-based).

Academic Integrity

Please make sure to read the class policies on academic integrity. Failure to adhere to the policies below could result in a student receiving a failing grade in the class.