Artificial Intelligence @ Johnson

Section NBA 4920, Spring 2026
Instructor Emaad Manzoor (emaadmanzoor@cornell.edu)
Meeting Location Breazzano Center, Room TBA
Meeting Time 2:55-4:10PM, Tuesday & Thursday
Canvas Site TBA (Syllabus)
Credits 3

What really happens when you type something into ChatGPT? What does benchmaxxxing and being scalling-pilled mean? Why does Claude keep telling you that you’re absolutely right? If you’re curious about questions like these, this course is for you.

This course will teach you the foundations of generative artificial intelligence with a focus on innovative business applications. No programming knowledge is required, but we ask you to bring creativity and grit.

Note: This is a pre-approved elective for the AI and data science minors.

Graded Work

The final grade will be a function of the following components.

  1. Group Homework 1 (5%): See PDF.
  2. Group Homework 2 (5%): See PDF.
  3. Group Homework 3 (5%): See PDF.
  4. Group Homework 4 (5%): See PDF.
  5. Midterm Exam (40%): Open laptop, ChatGPT etc. allowed.
  6. Group Project (30%): See project requirements.
  7. Attendance (10%): Attendance is mandatory and will be recorded.

The average grade in this section will be 3.50 as per Johnson School policy. Grades are relative and will be distributed as follows:

  1. Top 5%: A
  2. Next 50%: A- (modal grade)
  3. Next 25%: B+
  4. Next 10%: B
  5. Next 10%: B- and lower

Schedule

Date Topic Notes
Jan 20, 22 Prediction Machines
    How Machines Learn
    From Predictions to Decisions
    Case Study: Fraud at AirBnb		 HW1 out
Jan 27, 29 Generative AI
    Tokenization and Pretraining
    Inference and its Compute Costs
    In-Context Learning		  
Feb 3, 5 Context Engineering and Evals
    Few-Shot, Chain-of-Thought
    Evals and Guardrails
    Hands-on: OpenAI Platform		 HW1 due
HW2 out
Feb 10, 12 Embedding Private Knowledge
    Supervised Fine-tuning
    Retrieval-Augmented Generation		  
  February Break  
Feb 19, 24, 26 Agentic AI
    Test-time Computation
    Tool-use and Memory
    Hands-on: Agentic Workflows		 HW2 due
HW3 out
Mar 3, 5 Reinforcement Learning
    Models and Methods
    Reward Hacking
    Case Study: Algorithmic Pricing		  
Mar 10 Practice Midterm Exam HW3 due
Mar 12 Midterm Exam
    Open laptop, ChatGPT etc. allowed
    No human-human collaboration		  
Mar 17, 19 Alignment and Safety
    Preference Optimization
    Prompt Injection and Jailbreaking		 Project proposal due
Mar 24, 26 Project Hackathon
    Groups work with me in my office
    to implement their project demo
    Come with your idea and data!		  
  Spring Break  
Apr 7, 9 Multimodal and Embodied AI
    Diffusion Models
    VLMs, VLAs, and World Models
    Embodied Agents		  
Apr 14, 16 Mechanistic Interpretability
    Probes and Circuits
    Model Editing
    Hands-on: Transformer Circuits		 HW4 out
Apr 21 Augmented Intelligence
    Diagnosing Decisions with AI
    Designing Human-AI Collabs
    Case Study: Pinterest		  
Apr 23 Recommendation Machines
    Factorizing Interaction Matrices
    The Cold-start Problem
    Missingness and Feedback Loops
    Case Study: Spotify		 HW4 due
Apr 28, 30 Causal Artificial Intelligence
    Causal Inference: The “What If” Problem
    Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
    Personalized Treatment Policies		  
May 5, 7 In-Class Project Presentations Slides due