Course: ITAO 40250  |  Unstructured Data Analytics
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Faculty: John Lalor

Excerpt from Syllabus

Integrating Virtues Initiative

This course is part of Notre Dame’s Virtues & Vocations initiative, which promotes the integration of virtue ethics and moral purpose across academic disciplines. Concepts in this class are at the foundation of modern artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs).

Therefore, we will cultivate the moral virtues of humility and hope, the intellectual virtue of curiosity, and the civic virtue of deliberation. We will approach the course topics, and the rapidly changing landscape of artificial intelligence, with a humble and hopeful perspective. Curiosity will guide our investigation of the concepts and techniques so that we can deeply understand how and why AI systems generate outputs the way that they do.

Finally, deliberation will help us put what we learn into a broader perspective, forcing us to “zoom out” from the coding exercises to consider larger implications. We will incorporate this virtue cultivation through assigned readings, in-class discussions, and our final project.