CS 6180 — Foundations for Generative AI

4 semester hoursGraduateLectureusually offered: fall, springOnlineSilicon Valley, CAVancouver, CanadaHybridOnlineTraditional

Offers students an opportunity to obtain both the theoretical foundation and practical skills to understand, analyze, and apply generative AI techniques effectively. Begins with foundational concepts in AI and machine learning; progresses to advanced natural language processing, transformer models, and large language models; and concludes with cutting-edge techniques like prompt engineering, domain-specific adaptations, and retrieval-augmented generation.

Prerequisites

one of:
- CS 5100 (min C-)
- CS 5180 (min C-)
- CS 6120 (min C-)
- CS 6140 (min C-)
- CS 7140 (min C-)
- CS 7150 (min C-)
- DADS 7275 (min C-)
- EECE 5644 (min C-)

Offering history

Term	Sections	Enrolled	Capacity	Full	Open seats/section
Fall 2025	1	26	29	90%	3.0
Spring 2026	4	119	151	79%	8.0

Snapshots from scheduled scrapes — not live seat availability. "Full" can exceed 100% when sections over-enroll.

Meeting times

Share of recent sections by weekday: M 18% · T 0% · W 46% · Th 0% · F 0%

Common patterns: async (54% of sections), W (28% of sections), MW (18% of sections) — in patterns, R means Thursday

Professors

Fall

Nadim Saad (100% of students) · reviews

Spring

Ryan Rad (77% of students) · reviews
Jiaji Huang (23% of students)

Percentages are each professor's average share of the season's enrolled students in recent terms.

Unlocks

DADS 7305

Courses that list CS 6180 in their prerequisites.

Links

Official catalog (CS course descriptions) · Student reviews on RateMyHusky · All CS courses · Plan it at numap.app