Spatial AI Course Materials
Spatial AI Course → Materials
Session _01 → 2026 Jan 21
What is Spatial AI?
- Lecture → Introduction to the Course
- Workshop → Urban Observation with Teachable Machine
- Intro Survey
Session _02 → 2026 Jan 28
What is space?
- Discussion → What is space?
- Lecture → How Machine Learning Works
- Workshop → Neural Network Playground
- Readings Due
- Space: A History. Ancient Greek notions of space. (PDF, pgs 11-36)
- “The Japanese words for “space” could change your view of the world.” Quartz Magazine, Jerrold McGrath, 2018 January 18. (PDF, Link)
- Thrift, Nigel. (2003). 5 Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography. Key Concepts in Geography. 2. (PDF, pgs 96-105)
Session _03 → 2026 Feb 04
What is artificial intelligence?
- Lecture → What is AI?
- Workshop → Python and Hugging Face
- Readings Due
- Russell, Stuart J., and Peter Norvig. (2022). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Chapter 01, Introduction. (PDF, pgs 19-53).
- Shaun Carter and Michael Nielson. (2017). “Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence.” Distill. (Link)
- Turing, Alan M. (1950). “Computing machinery and intelligence.” Mind, 59, 433-460. (PDF 1 original scan, PDF 2 w/ minor OCR errors). Note about this reading: This was written in 1950 and has verbiage that today is considered controversial and biased; treat this more as an historical artifact rather than a modern-day text. It’s important to understand the origin of the “Imitation Game” (aka “The Turing Test”) with respect to the current thought around AI, particularly the prominent chatbot user experience.
- Tech Prep → TBD
Session _04 → 2026 Feb 11
Semantics and Language Models
- Lecture → What is Generative AI?
- Workshop → Running LLMs with LM Studio and Hugging Face
- Readings Due
- “Generative AI exists because of the transformer.” Financial Times, 2023 Sept 12. By Visual Storytelling Team and Madhumita Murgia.
Session _05 → 2026 Feb 18
LLM Capabilities Beyond Text Completion
- Workshop → LLM Function Calling with Funkify
Session _06 → 2026 Feb 25
- Workshop → Image Segmentation
Session _07 → 2026 Mar 04
- Workshop → Depth Estimation
(Kinne Week + Spring Break)
Session _08 → 2026 Mar 25
- Workshop → Vision Language Models
Session _09 → 2026 Apr 01
- Workshop → Scene Reconstruction with COLMAP
Session _10 → 2026 Apr 08
- Workshop → AI Agents 1
Session _11 → 2026 Apr 15
- Workshop → AI Agents 2
Session _12 → 2026 Apr 22
Project Final Review