Courses

CWI highly values education. CWI researchers not only supervise and inspire the CWI PhD students, but also aim at contributing to teaching Master's students at universities. See the overview of CWI's current involvement in teaching courses in the Netherlands below.

Contribution to education

CWI is a research institute and does not have education as an institutional task. However, many of the senior researchers of CWI contribute to education via an affiliation or part-time appointment at one of the Dutch universities. CWI conveys the knowledge of the scientists employed at our institute to the new generation of mathematics and computer science students. Our staff contributes by e.g. teaching a university course or supervising MSc thesis projects carried out by university students. They also supervise PhD students at CWI, who defend their thesis at one of the Dutch universities after their employment at CWI. All courses can be found below in alphabetical order. You can also open the pdf for a complete overview.

Machine Learning Theory

URL
Focus

In this course we focus on the fundamental ideas, theoretical frameworks, and rich array of mathematical tools and techniques that power machine learning.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Other educators
Period
1 feb 2026 – 31 jul 2026
Level
MSc

Selected Areas in Cryptology

URL
Focus

The goal of this course is to provide insight into cryptography secure against quantum computers (post-quantum cryptography) as well as various methods for the mathematical cryptanalysis of cryptographic systems.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
2 feb 2026 – 29 may 2026
Location
Universiteit Utrecht, De Uithof
Level
MSc
ECTS
8.00

Advanced Quantum Algorithms

A major claim to fame of quantum computers is that they will be able to solve some problems significantly faster than believed to be possible on a classical computer. The design of further quantum algorithms is an exciting active field of research, and there is still much left to explore in understanding which problems can be sped up by quantum computers, and by how much.

URL
Focus

In this course, students will learn about various advanced topics in quantum algorithms and algorithm design, as well as techniques for understanding for which problems it is possible to get a quantum speedup, and by how much.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
2 feb 2026 – 27 mar 2026
Level
MSc
ECTS
6.00

Evolutionary Algorithms

In this course we consider a specific subfield of Artificial Intelligence: Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs).

URL
Focus

This course covers a spectrum of topics in EAs, ranging from basic concepts to advanced, recent, and state-of-the-art research, and ranging from theoretical to applied.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
2 feb 2026 – 27 mar 2026
Level
MSc
ECTS
5.00

Additive combinatorics

Additive combinatorics is a relatively new area of mathematics that brings together areas such as combinatorial and analytic number theory, Ramsey theory, harmonic analysis, graph theory, extremal combinatorics, algebraic methods, ergodic theory and probability theory.

URL
Focus

To expose key ideas behind the Fourier-analytic and graph-theoretic proofs of Szemerédi's theorem, in addition to algebraic techniques used recently in breakthrough works for three-term arithmetic progressions in the finite-field setting.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
2 feb 2026 – 30 jun 2026
Level
MSc
ECTS
8.00

Multimodal interaction

In this course, we will take a closer look at all kinds of multimodal interaction including the related relevant theoretical background, e.g. about human perception.

URL
Focus

We will cover the emerging areas of virtual and augmented reality and cover a few other trends (e.g., brain-computer interfaces).

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
2 feb 2026 – 16 apr 2026
Level
MSc
ECTS
7.50

Algorithmic Game Theory

URL
Focus

Algorithmic Game Theory (AGT) is an interdisciplinary research area that lies in the intersection of Theoretical Computer Science, Discrete Mathematics and Economic Theory

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Period
4 mar 2026 – 15 may 2026
Location
UvA
Level
PhD

Graphical Models and Causality

URL
Focus

This course is an introduction to causal inference. We will study formalisms to express causal relations, frameworks for reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, and methods for discovering causal relations from data.

Type
Course
Organisation
CWI educators
CWI group
Other educators
  • (Instructor)
Period
1 apr 2026 – 1 jun 2026
Level
MSc
ECTS
5.00