Fall Semester 2026

Simon Fraser University

Instructor: Oliver Schulte

Breadth Area III

Course Logistics

Office Location: TASC 1 9021.

Office Phone: 778-782-3390.

Office Hours: Wednesday 3 pm-4 pm in CSIL lab.

TAs: Abdolreza Mirzaei

TA Office Hours: TBD

Announcements

• September 15: Syllabus Quiz is available on Canvas. Homework 1 has been posted.
• October 4: Homework 2 has been posted.

Homeworks

• Homework 1 is available. If the link does not work, go to Notebook.Blockchain.Homework 1 in the class notebook.
• Homework 2 is available. If the link does not work, go to Notebook.Computer Science Foundations.Homework 2 in the class notebook.

Course Information

• Syllabus. Updated September 9, 2026.
• Course Notebook. I've created a OneNote notebook for the course material.
• Google LLM Notebook with course readings
• Canvas Page. Quizzes (and only quizzes) will be managed through the course canvas page.
• SFU Self-Declaration Form.

Plan for the Course

The course has two parts.

1. Background on Payment systems, cryptocurrencies. Discusses the technical foundations and use cases for payment systems, particularly crytocurrencies and managing assets on the blockchain.
2. Large language models and AI. Much current research at the intersection of AI and finances explores the potential of large language models to support financial services by analysing financial texts.

A popular topic that is out of scope are applications of AI to trading financial assets, such as valuing options and picking stocks. For learning more about finance beyond this course, I highly recommend Robert Shiller's Open Yale introduction. Shiller is the winner of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Some of the lectures give career advice for finance.

• Robert Shiller's introduction discusses finding your purpose in Finance.
• Laura Cha's guest lecture describes her career in banking in Asia, both in the private sector and as a Chinese government regulator.
• Jon Founger tells from the story of how he went from being a student to investment banking to facebook executive.

Information for Projects

I ask you to complete the a project as a group for the following reasons.

1. Discussing topics with other students will help you understand them.
2. Having help with the project will lead to a better grade.
3. You can tackle a more ambitious projects.

A group should have 3 members. Each project group will contribute two project components.

1. A project outline presentation for your course project: introduce the problem, related work/material, describe your plan of attack. More details here.
2. A final project presentation about the results of your course project. More details here.

Information for Topic Presentations

This is a seminar course, so students are expected to cover part of the course material in presentations and discussions. Every student must contribute one presentation about a graph learning topic. Depending on the course progress, there may be an option to give two presentations. More details about the topic presentation.

Signing up for topic presentations

Please use the schedule below to sign up for a project presentation. The tentative course schedule is in the Course Notebook. Please put down your name and the topic you would like to cover.

Providing feedback on topic presentations

Every week you should send feedback to the group by email, copying our TA Abdolreza at abdolreza_mirzaei@sfu.ca .

• The group will specify the email address they want you to use.
• 2-3 paragraphs outlining 1 or 2 strong points and 1 or 2 points for improvement is a good length.
• It is enough to pick one presentation for giving feedback (even if there were two or more that week).
• If you presented in a week, please give feedback on the other group(s).

• Week 1. Sep 9.
• Week 2. Sep 14, 16.
• Week 3. Sep 21, 23
• Week 4. Sep 28.
• Week 5. Oct 5, 7. - Anjun, Jordan, Ethan - Money and Payment Systems. feedback to dad13@sfu.ca. Anelle, Aryan, Samuel - Smart Contracts and Stable Coins (send feedback to: aua19@sfu.ca)
• Week 6. Oct 14. Saba, Louise, & Jonny (Feedback to: jcg12@sfu.ca): Blockchain
• Week 7. Oct 19, 21. - Brielle, Chitransh, Tania: Payment Systems & Public Policy. Tracy, Kerla, Glora: Evolution of Payment Systems
• Week 8. Oct 26, 28. - Liam, Neil - Large language models for Finance
• Week 9. Nov 2, 4. - Aarish, Aurora, Dhwani - Multi-modal Financial LLMs
• Week 10. Nov 9. - Jonathan, Max & Hazel (Improving LLM Performance. Reinforcement learning from human feedback) (Thanks for your feedback: jga214@sfu.ca, sya171@sfu.ca, jza396@sfu.ca)
• Week 11. Nov 16, 18. - Kevin, Sabah, and, Tarun - Improving LLM Performance. Prompt Engineering, RAG, In-context learning
• Week 12. Nov 23, 25.