Schedule and Assignments (Winter 2026)

This schedule is subject to change.

Week Date Topics Readings and Assignments
1 Monday 1/5 INTRODUCTION
Course Overview; Engineering Respectful Computer Systems [slides]
respect and intentionality in designing computer systems
  • Assignment 1 due Thursday, 1/8
Wednesday 1/7 PRIVACY FOUNDATIONS UNIT
Defining and Legislating Privacy [slides]
privacy philosophy, law, and regulation
2 Monday 1/12 PRIVACY FOUNDATIONS UNIT
Anonymity [slides]
defining personal data, the difficulty of de-identifying data, redaction tools, deanonymization attacks
  • Reading Response 1 due Monday, 1/12
  • Assignment 2 due Thursday, 1/15
Wednesday 1/14 PRIVACY ENGINEERING UNIT
Statistical Privacy [slides]
k-anonymity, differential privacy in theory/practice
3 Monday 1/19 No class in observance of MLK Day
  • Reading Response 2 due Tuesday, 1/20
  • Assignment 3 due Thursday, 1/22
Wednesday 1/21 PRIVACY ENGINEERING UNIT
Data Lifecycles, Privacy Engineering Tools, and Private Computation [slides]
data access/portability, erasure rights, hash functions, Bloom filters, engineering systems for detecting CSAM, secure multi-party computation
4 Monday 1/26 MACHINE LEARNING UNIT
Supervised Learning in Practice [slides]
generalization, training and test data, common ML models, metrics, algorithmic decision making
  • Reading Response 3 due Monday, 1/26
  • Assignment 4 due Thursday, 1/29
Wednesday 1/28 MACHINE LEARNING UNIT
Unfair and Biased Algorithms; Auditing ML Models
biases of models, biases of data, attacks on models, algorithmic audits, processes and systems for documenting models, explainable ML, regulating AI
5 Monday 2/2 LLM UNIT
The Promise and Peril of Large Language Models (LLMs)
the technical design of large language models, the use of LLMs to generate prose/code, ChatGPT
  • Reading Response 4 due Monday, 2/2
  • Assignment 5 due Thursday, 2/5
Wednesday 2/4 LLM UNIT
Can AI Agents Capture Human Values and Human Accuracy?
the ethics of outsourcing tasks to AI agents, the future of work
6 Monday 2/9 LLM UNIT
Can Algorithms Be Creative?
the use of language modeling in creative contexts (writing, music, image generation), algorithmic curation, generative AI's impact on artists
  • Project proposal due Monday, 2/9
Wednesday 2/11 IN-CLASS MIDTERM
7 Monday 2/16 PRIVACY APPLICATIONS UNIT
Tracking, Surveillance, and Inference
web tracking, inference algorithms, facial recognition, DNA data, ubiquitous cameras and microphones, biomedical data, privacy by design, privacy impact assessments, privacy threat modeling, age-verification techniques
  • Reading Response 5 due Monday, 2/16
  • Assignment 6 due Thursday, 2/19
Wednesday 2/18 WORLD UNIT
Designing Computer Systems Outside of Western Contexts
internationalization, computer systems in under-resourced environments, engineering for contexts other than your own
8 Monday 2/23 WORLD UNIT
Waste Caused by Computing
energy usage of systems, proofs of work, machines that waste humans' time, disposal of devices, environmental impacts
  • Reading Response 6 due Monday, 2/23
  • Assignment 7 due Thursday, 2/26
Wednesday 2/25 PEOPLE UNIT
Ethical Experiments
a/b testing, designing reliable and ethical experiments, protection of human subjects
9 Monday 3/2 PEOPLE UNIT
Values: Discussion Between Blase and Brian Coyne (Advanced Lecturer in Political Science, Stanford University)
philosophical perspectives on ethics/justice, human rights, aligning values and code/systems, technological exploitation of labor, automation's impact on society
  • Reading Response 7 due Monday, 3/2
  • Project Presentations Will Be Scheduled During Exam Week (3/10 - 3/13)
  • Project Report due Friday, 3/13
Wednesday 3/4 PEOPLE UNIT
Values: Discussion Between Blase and Kathryn Hymes (Director of Product and Innovation, Médecins Sans Frontières)
technical perspectives on ethics, internationalization, and societal impact