Session guide
POLISCI 158 runs on two tracks: the politics track meets on Mondays, the tech track on Wednesdays. Materials appear here as the quarter goes on.
The course also has eight sections, run by the teaching team, that combine hands-on workshops with seminar-style discussion. Workshop guides and section assignments go up on the section website before each section meets.
Politics track · Mondays
One slide deck per session. Before class, each deck lists what to read, listen to, or explore. After class, it adds the key takeaways and places to go further. Use the arrow keys or swipe to move through the slides. A session's title opens its class slides; the Status column opens its prep deck.
| # | Date | Session | Status | Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wed, Sep 23 | Introduction | handout (PDF) | |
| 2 | Mon, Sep 28 | Demand Side I: Labor Markets, Productivity, and Automation | prep | 1, 2, 3 |
| 4 | Mon, Oct 5 | Demand Side II: Firms, Platforms, and Lobbying | prep | 1, 2 |
| 6 | Mon, Oct 12 | Demand Side III: Public Opinion and the Information Environment | prep | 1, 2 |
| 8 | Mon, Oct 19 | Supply Side I: Politicians, Campaigns, and Elections | prep | |
| 10 | Mon, Oct 26 | Guest Lecture: Bruce Cain and Wendy Tam | ||
| 11 | Wed, Oct 28 | Supply Side II: Public Institutions and Governance Capacity | coming soon | |
| 12 | Mon, Nov 2 | Data Centers | coming soon | |
| 14 | Mon, Nov 9 | US–China Competition | coming soon | |
| 16 | Mon, Nov 16 | AI Sovereignty | coming soon |
Tech track · Wednesdays
How AI systems are built, used, and governed, taught by Yiqing Xu. A session's title opens its lecture notes (PDF).
| # | Date | Session | Videos | Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Wed, Sep 30 | Statistical Learning and Deep Learning | video | 1, 2 |
| 5 | Wed, Oct 7 | Natural Language Processing | video | 1, 2 |
| 7 | Wed, Oct 14 | Large Language Models | video | 1, 2 |
| 9 | Wed, Oct 21 | Post-Training and Reasoning Models | video | 1, 2, 3 |
| 13 | Wed, Nov 4 | Computer Vision and Multimodality | coming soon | 1, 2 |
| 15 | Wed, Nov 11 | Agentic AI: From Chatbots to Agents | coming soon | 1, 2 |
| 17 | Wed, Nov 18 | AI Agents: Reliability, Safety, and Governance | coming soon | 1, 2 |
Curated by Simone Paci and Yiqing Xu, Stanford University. Drafted with AI assistance (Claude) from the instructors' course materials and reviewed by the instructors before publication; every external link is checked before each update.