CS540 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence


CS540, Fall 2026

Department of Computer Sciences

University of Wisconsin-Madison


# Schedule (Subject to Change)


Slides will be updated the week they are covered.

Week Date Topic Lecture Notes Assignments
1 Sep 2 Introduction, Perceptron, Logistic Regression L1, L2 -
2 Sep 9 Neural Network, Gradient Descent, Genetic Algorithm L3, L4 P1
3 Sep 16 Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbors L5, L6 P2
4 Sep 23 Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Network L7, L8 P3
5 Sep 30 Natural Language Processing, Naive Bayes L9, L10 P4
6 Oct 7 Recurrent Neural Network, Large Language Models, Graph Neural Network L11, L12 P5
7 Oct 14 Principal Component Analysis, T-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding L15, L16 P6
8 Oct 21 Hierarchical Clustering, K Means Clustering, Spectral Clustering L17, L18 -
9 Oct 28 Iterative Deepening Search, Dijkstra's Algorithm L19, L20 P7
10 Nov 4 Greedy Search, A* Search, Local Search L21, L22 P8
11 Nov 11 Game Theory, Minimax and Alpha-Beta Pruning L23, L24 P9
12 Nov 18 Markov Decision Process, Reinforcement Learning L25, L26 P10
13 Nov 25 Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Agent System L27, L28 -
14 Dec 2 Generative Adversarial Network, Diffusion Models L13, L14 -
15 Dec 9 Ethics and Trust in AI, Adversarial Machine Learning - -


📗 (RN) Russell and Norvig: Chapters from the optional textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig Link.
📗 Math and Statistics Review:
➩ Professor Jerry Zhu's "math crib sheet" (all the math you need to know for the course): Link.
➩ Calculus (for references only): Link.
➩ Linear Algebra (for references only): Link.
➩ Probability and Statistics (for references only): Link.
📗 Python Crash Course: PPTX

📗 Past exams by Professor Jerry Zhu: Link





Last Updated: October 14, 2026 at 12:43 AM