15-712 Advanced and Distributed Operating Systems, Fall 2026

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Course Staff

Instructors

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Office Hours
David Andersen	dga AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 9109	-	By Appointment

Teaching Assistant

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Office Hours
Ziyue Qiu	ziyueqiu@andrew.cmu.edu	GHC 5007	-	By Appointment

Course Secretary

Emi Perdan eperdan@cs.cmu.edu

Course Policies

Collaboration

Students are encouraged to talk to each other, to the course staff, or to anyone else about any of the assignments. Assistance must be limited to discussion of the problem and sketching general approaches to a solution. Each student must write out his or her own solutions to the homework.

Students MUST write paper summaries on their own. No AI or autocomplete use is permitted. Violating this policy will result in failing the course. The paper summaries are an integral part of working through the material: By writing your thoughts down after you read it, you exercise te neural pathways that remember information about the paper. The summaries are part of the learning process.

You are allowed to use AI as part of your research project - but you must write up your paper on your own. Writing the paper is where you make sure you really understand what's going on. It's part of the thinking process, it's not just mechanical. You need to do this yourself. You're welcome to use AI assistance after you draft it to fix spelling and grammar and even get feedback, but please don't let the LLM override your voice and way of communicating. LLMs are much better coders than they are writers.

You are responsible for the correctness of your results, AI or not. Research relies on us being careful scientists. You need to be certain your results actually say what you're presenting them as. You need to be certain your code is implementing what you believe it is. If you've used AI to generate substantial chunks of code, you are responsible for verifying that it did what you think it does, whether that's through manual inspection, very extensive testing, or even formal verification. You are the final line of research responsibility, AI or not.

Late Policy

• The deadline for any assignment can be extended with a 10% penalty per day.
• No deadline can be extended by more than two days. Assignments will NOT be accepted 48 hours after the due date.
• The project presentations must be given on the day they are scheduled.
• If you are ill on a deadline: Contact the instructor and get a medical note.
• This is a graduate-level course: All policies can be flexible (except the no AI on summaries one). Stay in touch with the course staff.