Artificial Intelligence @ Johnson

Section NBA 6921 Section 1 and 2, Spring 2026 (first half)
Instructor Emaad Manzoor (emaadmanzoor@cornell.edu)
Meeting Location Breazzano Center, 223
Meeting Time Section 1: 11:40AM-12:55PM, Tuesday & Thursday
Section 2: 1:25-2:40PM, Tuesday & Thursday
Canvas Site Link (Syllabus)
Credits 1.5

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 computer science, information science, engineering management, health administration, and many other graduate programs. Non-MBA graduate students must also take NBA 6925 to earn the 3 credits required by the program.

Graded Work

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

  1. Homework 1 (20%): See PDF.
  2. Homework 2 (20%): See PDF.
  3. Homework 3 (20%): See PDF.
  4. Exam (25%): Open laptop, ChatGPT etc. allowed.
  5. Attendance (10%): Attendance is mandatory and will be recorded.
  6. Course Evaluation (5%): See PDF.

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 Introduction to Prediction Machines
    How Machines Learn
    From Predictions to Decisions
    Case Study: Fraud at AirBnb		 HW1 out
Jan 27, 29 Foundations of Generative Thinking
    Tokenization and Pretraining
    Inference and its Compute Costs
    In-Context Learning		  
Feb 3, 5 Engineering Context
    Few-Shot, Chain-of-Thought
    Hands-on: OpenAI Platform		 HW1 due
HW2 out
Feb 10 Generative Evals
    Evals and Guardrails
    Hands-on: OpenAI Evals		  
Feb 12 Midterm Exam
    Open laptop, ChatGPT etc. allowed
    No human-human collaboration		  
  February Break  
Feb 19, 24 Embedding Private Knowledge
    Supervised Fine-tuning
    Retrieval-Augmented Generation		 HW2 due
HW3 out
Mar 3 Reinforcement Learning
    Reward Hacking
    Human Feedback
    Case Study: Algorithmic Pricing		  
Mar 5 Agentic AI
    Test-time Computation
    Tool-use and Memory
    Hands-on: Agentic Workflows		  
Mar 10 Agentic AI (contd.) HW3 due