Moodle Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

This 6-credit course will provide an introduction to generative AI, focusing on recent advances, challenges, and applications. The course will be structured into three modules, each offering lectures and hands-on experience as follows:

The first module will cover the fundamentals of foundation models, prompting strategies, pre-training, and fine-tuning methods.
The second module will cover the trustworthiness aspects of generative AI, including poisoning attacks, red teaming, and watermarking.
The third module will provide an overview of generative AI applications, in particular, focusing on educational technology and assistive agents for programming.

Lectures: Tuesdays 10:15am–12pm Office hours: Tuesdays 4pm–5pm and Wednesdays 5pm–6pm

The goal of this seminar is to introduce students to important research results in the area of software reliability, and in particular, program analysis, software engineering, and software security. To achieve this, students will study and present research papers in the area; they will also be expected to participate in paper discussions.

During this seminar, the students will...

• become familiar with a broad range of research results in the area of software reliability,
• learn how to read and understand papers in the area,
• learn how to evaluate papers in the area by highlighting limitations and suggesting possible improvements,
• learn how to present a technical topic in the area to an audience of peers.

Students become familiar with the area through a study of key papers, reviewing papers, presenting papers to colleagues, and working individually or in groups to solve a research problem.

Course for organizing the PLV reading group.

We would like to start a series of 'townhall talks' at the institute, which will feature a mix of technical overview, as well as communication, presentation, and other research skills talks. The technical overview talks will be high-level presentations about a group's current research. The research skills talks are meant to complement Rose's communication classes and support, and will be usually followed by a (panel) discussion, i.e. they are meant to be interactive. Everyone is encouraged to participate!

The talks are typically scheduled on the third Wednesday of each month.

The English Reading Group meets once a week throughout the year to focus on improving general verbal communication skills, pronunciation, and non-technical vocabulary.

Common activities include:

This course will cover both the writing process and the writing product. You will learn writing principles that will you help you to create text that is coherent, cohesive, and clear. A primary goal of this course is to teach you how to "escape" your own expertise in order to identify the parts of your text that will cause a reader difficulties. 

The course format will vary from week-to-week, and will include a mix of mini-lectures, exercises, one-on-one feedback, and group discussions of part of a paper (usually written by a course participant but sometimes selected from the literature). In order to get the most out of the class, participants will be expected to do substantial out-of-class writing (about one to two hours per week). The precise content of the course will be tailored to the course participants.

Prerequisites

This course is intended for PhD students and postdocs in Computer Science. For PhD students, I typically prefer that students have already taken my course on how to give scientific presentations. I do make exceptions, but students need to demonstrate that they already have basic competence at communicating scientific ideas verbally.

This course will cover both the writing process and the writing product. You will learn writing principles that will you help you to create text that is coherent, cohesive, and clear. A primary goal of this course is to teach you how to "escape" your own expertise in order to identify the parts of your text that will cause a reader difficulties. 

The course format will vary from week-to-week, and will include a mix of mini-lectures, exercises, one-on-one feedback, and group discussions of part of a paper (usually written by a course participant but sometimes selected from the literature). In order to get the most out of the class, participants will be expected to do substantial out-of-class writing (about one to two hours per week). The precise content of the course will be tailored to the course participants.

Prerequisites

This course is intended for PhD students and postdocs in Computer Science. For PhD students, I typically prefer that students have already taken my course on how to give scientific presentations. I do make exceptions, but students need to demonstrate that they already have basic competence at communicating scientific ideas verbally.

This course will cover both the writing process and the writing product. You will learn writing principles that will you help you to create text that is coherent, cohesive, and clear. A primary goal of this course is to teach you how to "escape" your own expertise in order to identify the parts of your text that will cause a reader difficulties. 

The course format will vary from week-to-week, and will include a mix of mini-lectures, exercises, one-on-one feedback, and group discussions of part of a paper (usually written by a course participant but sometimes selected from the literature). In order to get the most out of the class, participants will be expected to do substantial out-of-class writing (about one to two hours per week). The precise content of the course will be tailored to the course participants.

Prerequisites

This course is intended for PhD students and postdocs in Computer Science. For PhD students, I typically prefer that students have already taken my course on how to give scientific presentations. I do make exceptions, but students need to demonstrate that they already have basic competence at communicating scientific ideas verbally.