Special Topics

Special Topics courses cover some of our most innovative and promising research directions.  They are often prototypes of new courses that we are developing.

Special Topics courses offer variable course content, so each semester's offerings are unique.

Fall 2025

CSE 199 AI for Humans: the Brains behind the Bots (Seminar)
Section: AI
Instructor: Maria Rodriguez
Description: This course is designed to introduce freshman undergraduate students to the technical and societal workings of programming languages in artificial intelligence (AI). Programming languages are expressions of the mathematics developers need to create, train, and deploy AI systems of all kinds. Students in this course will not be learning a variety of programming languages, though a few will be explored lightly. This special topic offering of 199 explores the why of programming: the logic that makes it necessary. The course introduces students to mathematical concepts integral to AI, such as probability, statistics, and gradient descent and invites them to think about why programming languages are needed for the development of AI. At the end of the course, students will have a basic understanding of why programming works, will have independently used the programming software jupyter notebooks, and will be able to identify basic python libraries for training a handful of AI models on their own machine.
Instruction Mode: In person
Class #: 23773
Dates: 08/25/2025 - 12/08/2025
Days, Time: MW, 3:00PM-3:50PM
Location: Clemen 119, North Campus
Credit Hours: 3
Enrollment: 30/30 (Active)
Info:
CSE 199 Computing, AI, and Society (Seminar)
Section: B
Instructor: Xi Lu
Description: Computing is everywhere, and the connected world is all due to the availability of high-speed internet. Computing and the internet are an integral part of our daily lives, including how we communicate, navigate, merchandise, organize, work, and beyond. The advent of AI is changing everything rapidly. This course provides an overview of the intersection between Computing and Society. We will delve into the past and future of specific technologies, their underlying ideas & concepts, opportunities and challenges associated with them, and their societal implications. The course is targeted at a general audience. However, as the technologies and concepts we will look at reflect contributions from many areas of Computer Science and Engineering, the course will provide a good overview for students interested in this discipline. Familiarity with the web and access to a personal computer are assumed. No technical background is required to register for this course.
Instruction Mode: In person
Class #: 15491
Dates: 08/25/2025 - 12/08/2025
Days, Time: MW, 4:00PM-4:50PM
Location: Davis 101, North Campus
Credit Hours: 3
Enrollment: 31/150 (Active)
Info:
CSE 199 Computing, AI, and Society (Seminar)
Section: D
Instructor: Naeem Maroof
Description: Computing is everywhere, and the connected world is all due to the availability of high-speed internet. Computing and the internet are an integral part of our daily lives, including how we communicate, navigate, merchandise, organize, work, and beyond. The advent of AI is changing everything rapidly. This course provides an overview of the intersection between Computing and Society. We will delve into the past and future of specific technologies, their underlying ideas & concepts, opportunities and challenges associated with them, and their societal implications. The course is targeted at a general audience. However, as the technologies and concepts we will look at reflect contributions from many areas of Computer Science and Engineering, the course will provide a good overview for students interested in this discipline. Familiarity with the web and access to a personal computer are assumed. No technical background is required to register for this course.
Instruction Mode: In person
Class #: 15767
Dates: 08/25/2025 - 12/08/2025
Days, Time: MW, 4:00PM-4:50PM
Location: Knox 110, North Campus
Credit Hours: 3
Enrollment: 22/150 (Active)
Info:
CSE 199 Computing, AI, and Society (Seminar)
Section: E
Instructor: Naeem Maroof
Description: Computing is everywhere, and the connected world is all due to the availability of high-speed internet. Computing and the internet are an integral part of our daily lives, including how we communicate, navigate, merchandise, organize, work, and beyond. The advent of AI is changing everything rapidly. This course provides an overview of the intersection between Computing and Society. We will delve into the past and future of specific technologies, their underlying ideas & concepts, opportunities and challenges associated with them, and their societal implications. The course is targeted at a general audience. However, as the technologies and concepts we will look at reflect contributions from many areas of Computer Science and Engineering, the course will provide a good overview for students interested in this discipline. Familiarity with the web and access to a personal computer are assumed. No technical background is required to register for this course.
Instruction Mode: In person
Class #: 16003
Dates: 08/25/2025 - 12/08/2025
Days, Time: MW, 4:00PM-4:50PM
Location: Knox 104, North Campus
Credit Hours: 3
Enrollment: 6/150 (Active)
Info:
CSE 199 Computing, AI, and Society (Seminar)
Section: F
Instructor: Naeem Maroof
Description: Computing is everywhere, and the connected world is all due to the availability of high-speed internet. Computing and the internet are an integral part of our daily lives, including how we communicate, navigate, merchandise, organize, work, and beyond. The advent of AI is changing everything rapidly. This course provides an overview of the intersection between Computing and Society. We will delve into the past and future of specific technologies, their underlying ideas & concepts, opportunities and challenges associated with them, and their societal implications. The course is targeted at a general audience. However, as the technologies and concepts we will look at reflect contributions from many areas of Computer Science and Engineering, the course will provide a good overview for students interested in this discipline. Familiarity with the web and access to a personal computer are assumed. No technical background is required to register for this course.
Instruction Mode: In person
Class #: 16002
Dates: 08/25/2025 - 12/08/2025
Days, Time: MW, 4:00PM-4:50PM
Location: Knox 109, North Campus
Credit Hours: 3
Enrollment: 6/150 (Active)
Info:
CSE 410 GenAI (Lecture)
Section: SREY
Instructor: Sreyasee Das Bhattacharjee
Description: This course is intended for Computer Science students who are interested in understanding the fundamental issues, challenges and techniques that are associated with recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI). The course will discuss the history and properties of basic Generative AI systems including foundational probabilistic principles of generative models, their learning algorithms, and several state-of-the-art model families, which include variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, autoregressive models, flow based models, energy based models, and diffusion models. The course will be a combination of lectures, discussions, hands-on activities and projects. During the entire course, students will also learn about different applications in domains like computer vision, natural language processing, healthcare, etc.
Prereqs: CSE 474, or, CSE 455, or equivalent graduate level courses on AI topics
Instruction Mode: In person
Class #: 23083
Dates: 08/25/2025 - 12/08/2025
Days, Time: TR, 3:30PM-4:50PM
Location: Frnczk 454, North Campus
Credit Hours: 1-3
Enrollment: 1/40 (0/40 seats reserved: force registration only) (Active)
Info: