Schedule

The course schedule is subject to change at the instructor's discretion. Any updates will be announced in the #announcements channel on the class Discord.

 So please check this page regularly. 

Week 01

Week 01: Foundations of Algorithmic & Bio-Inspired Design -- [📄 Statement of Understanding Due]

• Tue (01/14/2025) -- First Day of TR Class: Lecture -- Procedural logic, natural language rules, and mathematical simulations of organic growth (Genetic Algorithms, L-Systems, Artificial Life).

• Thur (01/16/2025): Lab Focus -- Local workstation environment setup, CUDA driver verification, and basic Python execution of evolutionary algorithms.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 1989 | Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning | Addison-Wesley

• 📄 Milestone: Statement of Understanding Due

Week 02

Week 02: Computer Vision Foundations & Spatial Sensing -- [📌 Assignment 1 Released]

• Tue (01/21/2025): Lecture -- Real-time object detection, spatial bounding, and feature extraction within computational design pipelines.

• Thur (01/23/2025): Lab Focus -- Deploying local computer vision models; benchmarking object detection and spatial feature extraction.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2016 | You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection | IEEE/CVF CVPR

• 📌 Milestone: Assignment 1 Released (The Creative Brain & Multi-View Ideation)

Week 03

Week 03: Latent Diffusion & Denoising Mechanics

• Tue (01/28/2025): Lecture -- Mathematical mechanics of forward Gaussian noise injection and reverse denoising (VAEs vs. GANs vs. Latent Diffusion).

• Thur (01/30/2025): Lab Focus -- Installing Stable Diffusion / ComfyUI on local GPU hardware; node configuration and VRAM memory management.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2022 | High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models | IEEE/CVF CVPR

Week 04

Week 04: Advanced Diffusion & Rectified Flow Architecture -- [📥 Assignment 1 Due / 📌 Assignment 2 Released]

• Tue (02/04/2025): Lecture -- Rectified Flow Transformers (FLUX.1), continuous-time flow matching, and multi-view latent conditioning.

• Thur (02/06/2025): Lab Focus -- Building ComfyUI workflows for consistent multi-view turnaround sheets (front, side, back views) on neutral backgrounds.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2024 | Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis | IEEE/CVF CVPR

• 📥 Milestone: Assignment 1 Due

• 📌 Milestone: Assignment 2 Released (The Dimensional Leap: 2D-to-3D Mesh Extraction)

Week 05

Week 05: Digital Sovereignty, Data Mimicry, & Design Ethics

• Tue (02/11/2025): Lecture -- Dataset bias, copyright frameworks, training-time attribution, and intellectual property in generative creative work.

• Thur (02/13/2025): Lab Focus -- Auditing local offline datasets; building non-cloud, privacy-preserving local generation pipelines.

• Assigned Readings:

  • 2023 | Do Models Copy? Evaluating Data Mimicry in Latent Diffusion Models | IEEE/CVF CVPR

  • 2024 | Training-Time Attribution and Use-Time Valuation in Generative AI Creative Work | IEEE/CVF CVPR

Week 06

Week 06: Open-Source LLMs & Local Infrastructure

• Tue (02/18/2025): Lecture -- Architectural evolution of open-source LLMs (LLaMA); advantages of self-hosted deployments over SaaS platforms.

• Thur (02/20/2025): Lab Focus -- Clean local deployment of open-source LLaMA models; configuring inference engines (ollama / vLLM) on local GPUs.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2023 | LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models | Meta

Week 07

Week 07: Quantization & Local Hardware Optimization

• Tue (02/25/2025): Lecture -- Parameter scale, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), QLoRA, and VRAM memory constraints during local inference.

• Thur (02/27/2025): Lab Focus -- Quantizing models for RTX A6000 and 5070 Ti hardware; engineering system prompts for structured output formats.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2023 | QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs | NeurIPS

Week 08

Week 08: Open-Source Reasoning Architectures -- [📥 Assignment 2 Due / 📌 Assignment 3 Released]

• Tue (03/04/2025): Lecture -- DeepSeek-V3 & DeepSeek-R1 architecture, reinforcement learning for reasoning capability, and chain-of-thought system prompts.

• Thur (03/06/2025): Lab Focus -- Local deployment of DeepSeek models; authoring system prompts to act as an automated "Design Director."

• Assigned Readings:

  • 2024 | DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report | DeepSeek-AI

  • 2025 | DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning | Nature

• 📥 Milestone: Assignment 2 Due

• 📌 Milestone: Assignment 3 Released (Optimization & The Physical Proof)

Week 09

Week 09: Multimodal Reasoning & Multi-Agent Pipelines

• Tue (03/11/2025): Lecture -- Multimodal large language models (Vision-R1), visual reasoning capabilities, and automated design agent orchestrations.

• Thur (03/13/2025): Lab Focus -- Piping DeepSeek prompt outputs directly into ComfyUI/FLUX generation nodes via local Python scripts.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2026 | Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models | ICLR

Week of Break

Mid-Semester Recess

• Tue (03/18/2025): No Class (Spring Vacation)

• Thur (03/20/2025): No Class (Spring Vacation)

Week 10

Week 10: 2D-to-3D Neural Generation & Latent Lifting -- [📥 Assignment 3 Due / 🚀 Final Project Released]

• Tue (03/25/2025): Lecture -- Text-to-3D and Image-to-3D mechanics using 2D diffusion priors (DreamFusion) vs. direct 3D latent representations.

• Thur (03/27/2025): Lab Focus -- Local deployment of 3D generative frameworks (TRELLIS 2 / Hunyuan3D); generating explicit 3D meshes from multi-view sheets.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2023 | DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion | IEEE/CVF ICCV

• 📥 Milestone: Assignment 3 Due

• 🚀 Milestone: Final Project Integration Phase Commences

Week 11

Week 11: Real-Time 3D Radiance Fields & Splatting

• Tue (04/01/2025): Lecture -- 3D Gaussian Splatting vs. NeRFs; real-time radiance field rendering and spatial asset reconstruction.

• Thur (04/03/2025): Lab Focus -- Training Gaussian Splats locally; extracting textured meshes and analyzing topological hallucinations on hidden angles.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2023 | 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering | ACM SIGGRAPH

Week 12

Week 12: Geometry Extraction, Mesh Repair, & Topology

• Tue (04/08/2025): Lecture -- Non-manifold geometry remediation, poly-decimation, UV texture projection, and watertight mesh repair logic.

• Thur (04/10/2025): Lab Focus -- Automating mesh repair via Blender Python API (bpy); converting raw AI meshes into production-ready .OBJ / .GLB formats.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2024 | Text-to-3D Generation with Rich Texturing and High-Fidelity Geometry | ACM SIGGRAPH

Week 13

Week 13: Spatial Environments & Additive Manufacturing Preparation -- [📌 Final Project Milestone Due]

• Tue (04/15/2025): Lecture -- Physical dynamics-aware spatial systems (VR-GS); bridging digital shells with physical manufacturing constraints.

• Thur (04/17/2025): Lab Focus -- Slicer configuration (OrcaSlicer / Cura), wall thickness, support placement, and running physical test prints.

• Assigned Reading:

  • 2024 | VR-GS: A Physical Dynamics-Aware Interactive Gaussian Splatting System in Virtual Reality | ACM SIGGRAPH

• 📌 Milestone: Final Project Milestone Due

Week 14

Week 14: System Integration & End-to-End Automation

• Tue (04/22/2025): Lecture -- Software architecture for push-button AI design tools; unifying LLM reasoning, 2D generation, and 3D mesh extraction.

• Thur (04/24/2025): Lab Focus -- Integrating DeepSeek + ComfyUI/FLUX + TRELLIS 2/Hunyuan3D into a single local Python script or UI plugin.

• Assigned Reading: None (Dedicated to Final Project Development)

Week 15

Week 15: Pipeline Optimization, IP Sovereignty, & Pitch Prep

• Tue (04/29/2025): Lecture -- Cost-benefit analysis (human agency vs. open-source local pipeline), IP sovereignty arguments, and venture pitch structuring.

• Thur (05/01/2025) -- Last Day of TR Classes: Lab Focus -- Stress-testing automated live demos; post-processing and finishing physical 3D-printed masterpieces.

• Assigned Reading: None (Dedicated to Final Project Development)

Week 16

Week 16: Live Showcase & "Agency Killer" Venture Pitch -- [🎓 Final Presentation & Demo]

• Final Exam Window: Monday (05/05/2025) through Friday (05/09/2025)

• Lecture Session: Final Industry Pitch Presentations & Peer Review.

• Lab Focus Session: Live push-button software demonstrations; final exhibition of physical 3D masterpieces and agency pitch decks.

• Assigned Reading: None

• 🎓 Milestone: Final Project Live Pitch & Demo Due

© You-Jin Kim
        Nebraska–Lincoln 🌽