Special Topics Course

This course deals with designing cryptographic systems that are conjectured to resist poly-time quantum attacks. We will discuss different (plausibly) post-quantum secure cryptographic assumptions. We will also show how to build cryptographic systems from these assumptions. We will also see cryptanalytic attacks on some cryptographic assumptions.

Pre-requisites: undergraduate course in cryptography (CMPSC 178), undergraduate course in quantum computing (CMPSC 190H).

This class is an introductory undergraduate course about networks, which can be used to study complex systems of interacting entities. The study of networks — including theory, computation, and applications — is pervasive in physics, biology, sociology, computer and information science, and myriad other fields. The study of networks is also a major part of data science.

This class is an introductory undergraduate course in machine learning. The class will briefly cover topics in regression, classification, neural networks, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, graph neural networks, ensemble methods and reinforcement learning. The class will contain a project component.

This course will be about modern artificial intelligence and machine learning. It will start with a general overview of five fundamental neural networks (MLP, CNN, RNN, Autoencoder and Transformer) and followed by discussions of text, image and video generation techniques.

Deep neural networks have demonstrated impressive performance, yet their vulnerability to adversarial attacks has made adversarial machine learning an important topic. In this course, students will explore core principles of adversarial learning and learn how to adapt these techniques to diverse adversarial contexts. The curriculum combines lectures focused on algorithm foundations with paper presentations (by students) highlighting current state-of-the-art advances in modern AI models (e.g., large language models).

This graduate-level research course focuses on foundation models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). Throughout the course, we will examine the latest research publications in this rapidly evolving field, with a particular emphasis on the foundations of LLMs and their applications. Students are expected to engage in reviewing and presenting research papers, and completing a substantial course project. The primary objective of this course is to cultivate a deep understanding of LLMs and their limitations.

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This graduate course will introduce students to the multidisciplinary field of bionic vision viewed through the lens of computer science, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction. There are no official prerequisites for this course. The instructor will do his best to make the course content self-contained, including a crash course in neuroscience & computational vision. However, homeworks and final projects will require programming. Homeworks will be based around pulse2percept, a Python-based simulation framework for bionic vision.

This graduate course gives an overview of machine learning for planning and control of complex dynamical systems. Topics include reinforcement learning in continuous state/action spaces, data-driven dynamics models, imitation learning, online policy optimization, and robustness/adaptivity to environment shifts. Students will develop a thorough understanding of fundamental algorithms and learn to select appropriate methods based on the problem's interaction and information protocols.

This class is a hands-on class on vulnerability analysis that uses security exercises as a basis for education and training. Students will be required to solve medium-to-complex security problems during class. The problems require an understanding of operating system concepts, as well as the basics of computer security. 

Course pre-requisities: CMPSC 170 and CMPSC 177. Once the quarter starts, instructor approval is required to maintain enrollment in the course, including if students do not have the listed pre-requisite courses completed.