This MIT IAP credited course is offered by CSAIL Alliances member Sony Interactive Entertainment (the team behind PlayStation). Curious about IAP? Learn more.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), creators of the PlayStation platform, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) joined forces January 2025 to launch a new IAP course exploring the nexus of video games and artificial intelligence. This highly popular course brought together students, researchers, and industry practitioners to examine how AI is transforming the design, play, and social impact of games.

This year, an expanded version of the course will be available for credit and will be led by Professor Fredo Durand. Like last year, the course will combine a series of lectures and hackathon-style projects, the latter chosen from a list of examples or otherwise devised, to introduce students to game creation, current game-related research and an exploration of the technology, the art and the fun of video games. The program is designed to be accessible to a broad MIT audience, requiring no specialized background in computer science or game development. We encourage students with an interest in art, psychology, writing, social impact and design of games to participate.

Format: 12 Lectures (60–75 minutes each) with Q&A, culminating in student team projects presented on January 30.

See the full details and register: https://calendar.mit.edu/event/the-nexus-of-games-and-ai-nexus-ii-mit-iap-2026

The CSAIL Forum event series is hosted by Professor Daniela Rus, CSAIL Director. This virtual series was created to inspire conversation, share insights, and shape the future of computer science and artificial intelligence. Registration is required. 
See past forum recordings and learn more here

Speaker: Mohammad Alizadeh, NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering
Date/time: Tuesday 12:00-1:00 EST, December 9, 2025 
Virtual via Zoom: Registration required
Title: Glia: A Human-Inspired AI for Automated Systems Design and Optimization

Abstract: 
Can an AI autonomously design mechanisms for computer systems on par with the creativity and reasoning of human experts? In this talk, I'll introduce Glia, an AI architecture for automated systems design that uses large language models (LLMs) in a human-inspired, multi-agent workflow. Each agent specializes in reasoning, experimentation, and analysis, collaborating through an evaluation framework that grounds abstract reasoning in empirical feedback. Unlike prior ML-for-systems methods that optimize black-box policies, Glia generates interpretable designs and exposes its reasoning process. When applied to a distributed GPU cluster for LLM inference, it produces new algorithms for request routing, scheduling, and auto-scaling that perform at human-expert levels in significantly less time, while yielding novel insights into workload behavior. Our results suggest that by combining reasoning LLMs with structured experimentation, an AI can produce creative and understandable designs for complex systems problems.

Bio:
Mohammad Alizadeh is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering at MIT EECS and a principal investigator in CSAIL. His current research focuses on leveraging AI for automated system design and optimization, intelligent decision-making, and system simulation. Mohammad's past research on datacenter networks led to protocols now implemented in commercial operating systems and switching products, and deployed by large datacenter operators. Mohammad's work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, VMware Systems Research Award, SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, and multiple best paper awards. He earned his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and his BS from Sharif University of Technology. Before joining MIT EECS in 2015, he worked at Insieme Networks and Cisco Systems.