Policies

AI use and evidence

Use AI actively and creatively. Learning to collaborate effectively with AI tools is part of this course: explore more ideas, build faster, and deepen your understanding.

  • AI tools are welcome throughout the course: learning unfamiliar concepts, brainstorming, finding literature, coding, debugging, running experiments, and improving writing. Thoughtful AI use is encouraged, not penalized.
  • Include a brief note describing meaningful AI assistance and how you checked the result. Be ready to explain your design choices, code, and conclusions in your own words.
  • Every citation must be checked against a primary source, and every numerical result must trace to an actual experiment, simulator output, formal result, or cited source.
  • AI-generated code must satisfy the same correctness, testing, performance, licensing, and provenance requirements as human-written code.

Academic integrity

Students must follow Columbia academic-integrity policies. Fabricated citations, invented experiments, altered logs, undisclosed result selection, plagiarism, or presenting agent-generated claims as verified evidence are serious violations. When in doubt, disclose the tool, source, assistance, or collaboration.

Accessibility & accommodations

Students who require disability-related accommodations should contact Columbia Disability Services and inform the instructor as early as possible so approved accommodations can be implemented. Please communicate time-sensitive circumstances before deadlines whenever possible.

Late work

Each team may use one 48-hour grace pass on a written milestone, requested before the deadline. The grace pass does not apply to in-class presentations, the final poster, or the final submission. Other extensions require prior approval or documented circumstances.

Changes to the syllabus

This is a first-offering advanced-topics course in a rapidly changing research area. Individual readings, project briefs, guest-speaker scheduling, or detailed deadlines may be updated when new work appears or infrastructure changes. Material changes will be announced clearly and will not retroactively disadvantage students.