Syllabus and Logistics

Syllabus

• Week 01/Lecture 01 (09.07): Introduction & Logistics
• Week 02/Lecture 02 (09.14): Affordance, Functionality, and HOIs (Part 1)
• Week 03/Lecture 03 (09.21): Affordance, Functionality, and HOIs (Part 2)
• Week 04/Lecture 04 (09.28): Intuitive Physics
• Week 05: National Holidays
• Week 06/Lecture 05 (10.12): Causality
• Week 07/Paper Presentation 1 (10.19): Physical Commonsense (Attendance Required)
• Week 08/Midterm (10.26)
• Week 09/Lecture 06 (11.02): Course Project Intro
• Week 10/Lecture 07 (11.09): Tool, Mirroring, and Imitation (Part 1)
• Week 11/Lecture 08 (11.16): Tool, Mirroring, and Imitation (Part 2)
• Week 12/Lecture 09 (11.23): Intro to Social Commonsense
• Week 13/Lecture 10 (11.30): LLM Inference
• Week 14/Paper Presentation 2 (12.07): Social Commonsense (Attendance Required)
• Week 15 (12.14): Project Pre 1 (Attendance Required)
• Week 16 (12.21): Project Pre 2 (Attendance Required)
• Week 19 (01.11): Project Report Due (Hard DDL)

Grading

• required attendance: 10%
• midterm: 10%
• 3 labs (out of 6): 20%
• 5 quiz: 10%
• paper presentation (in English): 15%
• project presentation (in English): 15%
• project report (in English and LaTeX): 20%

Project Report

• team: 4-5 students
• duration: the entire semester
• topic: choose one listed on the project page (see also the instructions); topics are exclusive among teams; reserve online
• delivery:
  1. technical report in English in top conference quality that includes
  • insights of the problem
  • related work / literature review
  • major components of the systems of algorithms
  • technical details, e.g., learning, training, parameters
  • experimental results
  2. publicly available code, e.g., on GitHub

Paper Presentation

• team: 4-5 students
• duration: up to the presentation session
• topic: choose papers listed in one of the 10 topics and additional papers at your own choice
• note: no need to cover all the listed papers, but need to convey a coherent message during the presentation
• delivery: presentation, in English

Project Presentation

• duration: up to the presentation session
• content: present the full arc of your semester project, including
  • an overview of the project topic and your team’s research question
  • division of work among team members
  • technical implementation: methods, models, and key design decisions
  • challenges encountered and how you addressed them
  • results, findings, and anything worth sharing with the class
• note: the presentation should tell a coherent story from motivation to outcome; highlight what was non-obvious or surprising
• delivery: presentation, in English