This work considers the use of AI and parallelism as a context for learning typical programming concepts in an introductory programming course (CS1). The course includes exercises in decision trees, a novel game called Find the Gnomes to introduce supervised learning, the construction and application of a vectorized neural network unit class, and obtaining speedup in training through parallelism. The exercises are designed to teach students typical introductory programming concepts while also providing a preview and motivating example of advanced CS topics. Students' understanding and motivation are considered through a detailed analysis of pre- and post-survey data gathered in several sections of the course each taught by one of four instructors across five semesters.

It is common to listen to songs that match one's mood. Thus, an AI music recommendation system that is aware of the user's emotions is likely to provide a superior user experience to one that is unaware. In this paper, we present an emotion-aware music recommendation system. Multiple models are discussed and evaluated for affect identification from a live image of the user. We propose two models: DRViT, which applies dynamic routing to vision transformers, and InvNet50, which uses involution. All considered models are trained and evaluated on the AffectNet dataset. Each model outputs the user's estimated valence and arousal under the circumplex model of affect. These values are compared to the valence and arousal values for songs in a Spotify dataset, and the top-five closest-matching songs are presented to the user. Experimental results of the models and user testing are presented.

This paper describes the design and training of a computer Gin Rummy player. The system includes three main components to make decisions about drawing cards, discarding, and ending the game, with numerous parameters controlling behavior. In particular, an ensemble approach is explored in the discard decision. Finally, three sets of parameter tuning and performance experiments are analyzed.