Labs
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each lab, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
Each lab pairs with that week's lecture and asks you to build or break a small piece of the system just described — a toy T9 disambiguator, an autocorrect you deliberately trip up, an audit of your own inbox's smart replies. Bring what the week's brief asks for; what you leave with is listed on each lab's own page.
Build a T9 disambiguator
The first lab — turn a keypress sequence into a ranked list of real words, using nothing but a dictionary and a mapping of letters to keys
Week 1 · 25 February 2027
Autocorrect post-mortem
A lab spent deliberately breaking an autocorrect implementation, then writing up why each break happened
Week 2 · 4 March 2027
Query completion audit
A lab auditing a real search box's autocomplete for suggestions its owner probably wouldn't choose to put there on purpose
Week 3 · 11 March 2027
AAC scanning simulation
A lab spent composing sentences through a scanning-and-selection interface with a deliberately mediocre word predictor, to feel the cost of a bad list
Week 4 · 18 March 2027
Assignment 1 clinic
A work session for Assignment 1, run as one-on-one check-ins rather than a taught lab, in the week the assignment is due
Week 5 · 25 March 2027
Inbox smart-reply audit
A lab auditing your own email or messaging app's suggested replies against the messages that triggered them
Week 6 · 1 April 2027
Continuation-swap lab
A lab where pairs swap half-finished conversations and try to tell a model's continuation from a human one, then check their reasoning
Week 7 · 15 April 2027
Inpainting seams lab
A lab spent generating and then deliberately hunting for the seams in inpainted images, cataloguing which tells actually generalise
Week 8 · 22 April 2027
Forecast UI comparison
A lab comparing how three real forecast interfaces represent uncertainty for the same underlying kind of prediction
Week 9 · 29 April 2027
Co-writing exchange
A lab where you write a short piece with a predictive tool, log every suggestion you accepted or rejected, and trade logs with a partner
Week 10 · 6 May 2027
Feed reverse-engineering
A lab where you deliberately engage with a narrow slice of content on a fresh or logged-out feed and log how quickly the recommendations shift
Week 11 · 13 May 2027
Closing crit
The last lab of the semester — short presentations of final project work in progress, judged against the persuasion framework from this week's lecture
Week 12 · 20 May 2027