Annotated outlines from class sessions
These annotated outlines capture the key topics, student contributions, and discussion threads from each class session. They serve as study aids and a record of our collective exploration of secure and trustworthy AI.
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Worker displacement in tech and cybersecurity, the singularity debate and exponential AI progress, cognitive and skill degradation from AI over-reliance, and applying philosophical ethical frameworks to AI systems.
Monday, February 2, 2026
Insights from student questionnaires (six themes), current events (AI-only social media platforms), and a deep dive into fairness -- distributive, procedural, and interactional types, the Capuchin monkey experiment, and ML tasks where fairness matters.
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
AI-specific privacy threats (deepfake identity fraud, automated phishing), autonomy and sycophancy in AI systems, AI and human rights from cross-cultural perspectives, and frameworks for human-AI collaboration.
Monday, February 16, 2026
Seven student-led case study presentations and discussions: NEDA Tessa chatbot, CBA worker displacement, SoftBank Pepper robot, Scatter Lab Luda chatbot, Adam Raine/ChatGPT, AI deepfake romance scams, and the AI-generated Pentagon explosion image. Thematic analysis of premature deployment vs. intentional misuse.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Governance etymology and cybernetics, the five-stage AI/ML pipeline: datasheets for datasets (Gebru et al.), model cards (Mitchell et al.) with live demos of Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Hugging Face platforms, international standards (ISO/IEC 42001, IEEE 7000), and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Pre-class debate on the reported DoD/Anthropic Defense Production Act story, risks and ethics of AI in military applications, and the geopolitical context; midterm-exam logistics and guest-instructor announcements; recap of the 3Blue1Brown Transformer videos and emergence (BOIDs, swarm behavior); reinforcement learning, the AlphaGo documentary, and continual learning / catastrophic forgetting.
Monday, March 9, 2026
Return-from-Spain check-in and recap of the prior week (instructor absent), upcoming midterm-exam logistics, and a discussion of natural human learning, reward hacking, and the purpose of a university education.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
In-class midterm review session: walkthrough of the study-guide topics and Q&A ahead of the comprehensive midterm exam covering material through Unit 6.
Monday, March 30, 2026
Opening discussion of the "Rent a Human" platform; a video walkthrough of a five-phase LLM-assisted development cycle (Review → Brainstorm → Research → Plan → Execute) with a live demo building an interactive Streamlit app to visualize concept drift in a classifier under natural and adversarial conditions.
Companion outline to Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown video
A section-by-section outline of the 3Blue1Brown video introducing the Transformer architecture: word embeddings, the high-level data flow through a transformer, the deep-learning premise, unembedding, and softmax with temperature. Summarizes third-party material — see the original video for full context.
Companion outline to Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown video
A step-by-step outline of the 3Blue1Brown video on attention: queries and keys, the attention pattern, masking, context size, value matrices, multi-headed attention, and why attention works. Summarizes third-party material — see the original video for full context.