Schedule

The schedule below is tentative and will be updated as the semester progresses.

Date	Topic	Lead	Assignment
8/20/26	Introduction	Heckman & Zhao	A0 out
8/25/26	Scaling Laws & Model Codesign	Heckman
8/27/26	Model Architectures & Trade-offs	Heckman	A1 out
9/1/26	ML Systems and MLOps	Zhao
9/3/26	Model Evaluation	Heckman	A2 out
9/8/26	Data Synthesis & Curation	Heckman
9/10/26	Data Infrastructure I	Zhao
9/15/26	Data Infrastructure II	Zhao	A3 out
9/17/26	Training Systems I	Zhao
9/22/26	Training Systems II	Zhao
9/24/26	Training Systems III	Zhao	A4 out
9/29/26	Project Day	Heckman & Zhao
10/1/26	Fine-tuning & PEFT	Heckman
10/6/26	Inference Systems I	Zhao	A5 out
10/8/26	Reading Day (campus) — no class
10/13/26	Inference Systems II	Zhao
10/15/26	Inference Systems III	Zhao
10/20/26	Model Optimizations for Inference	Heckman	A6 out
10/22/26	Model Quantization	Heckman
10/27/26	Post-training I: RLHF & GRPO	Heckman
10/29/26	Post-training II: RLVR	Heckman
11/3/26	Agentic AI	Zhao	A7 out
11/5/26	Prompt Engineering & Tools	Heckman
11/10/26	Sustainability and ML	Zhao
11/12/26	Applications: Robotics	Heckman
11/17/26	Applications: Vision at Scale	Heckman
11/19/26	Applications: GeoAI	Heckman
11/24/26	Fall break — no class
11/26/26	Fall break — no class
12/1/26	Last Lecture	Heckman & Zhao
12/3/26	Poster Session	Heckman & Zhao
12/9/26	Final Exam (Wednesday)