This summer I am teaching the Spark Summer Practicum at CUA. The practicum is meant to help participants move from general familiarity with AI tools toward concrete workflows and small products that can be used in their own work. To get a better sense of the group, I asked participants...
This is a quick note to summarize what I think are the main components of training a capable LLM in early 2026. These notes are primarily to organize my thoughts for myself. I’m putting them online in the hope that they may be useful for others. My overall sense is...
Topology is at the core of the most successful algorithms in Robotics. To understand how these methods work, you need a basic grasp of topological ideas (see Chapter 4 of LaValle’s book for example ). But as computational topology has advanced and computers have gotten faster, there has been...
Fluency with ROS is essential for doing robotics. A lot of the students I’ve worked with in the past have no problem getting through the ROS tutorials , but start to flounder as soon as they need to create their first ROS node. My goal with this tutorial is...
I have a few new graduate students this semester. They’re coming in with a solid background in AI, but they’re all working on the car so they need to get (more) up to speed on robotics. To that end, we’re going to be doing weekly readings related to robotics and...
Just getting things set up…