Yusuf Pisan

PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University (1998). Teaching Professor at the Computing & Software Systems division of University of Washington Bothell, where I have taught since 2017. Before Seattle: 20 years in Sydney at UTS, and visiting appointments at Harvey Mudd, USC, WPI, and ITU Copenhagen.

My research group T4G (Tech for Good) works on CS education, AI systems, and video games. I founded the UTS Games Studio and the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. I received the UWB Distinguished Teaching Award in 2023.

CV (PDF) Google Scholar Teaching Evaluations Evaluation Graphs

Education2AI on Substack

I write about AI in education, classroom experiments, and building with LLMs — from a CS professor who has been doing it hands-on since March 2026.

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Recent AI Projects

I have been building AI-assisted applications since March 2026 — games, voting tools, classroom experiments, automation, and more. A few highlights:

Digital Yusuf

Chat with an AI version of me, built on 155 K characters of persona data from 30+ public sources. No RAG — the entire persona lives in the system prompt.

MyChessMaster

Stockfish finds the moves that lost the game, a coach model explains why, and your own mistakes become a spaced-repetition drill deck. Plus opponent scouting and a prep page for the next game.

YPDSA

A Claude-backed teaching assistant for my data structures courses: it asks before it answers, and gates code help behind prerequisite mastery checks. Available to UW students only at this point.

Daily Project Ideas

Every morning at 5 am a cron job reads five subreddits, surfs the web, and commits three new project ideas to GitHub. The prompt is in version control.

See all 20+ AI projects →

Teaching

25+ years of teaching across three continents, from 8-student seminars to 700-student lectures. Current courses at UW Bothell include CSS 343 (Data Structures), CSS 382 (AI), CSS 385 (Game Dev), and CSS 430 (Operating Systems). UWB Distinguished Teaching Award, 2023.

Teaching page All evaluations (2004–present) Evaluation graphs

Research

T4G (Tech for Good) works at the intersection of CS education, artificial intelligence, and video games. My PhD in AI (Northwestern, 1998) focused on qualitative reasoning and diagrammatic problem-solving.

Research page T4G Research Group Google Scholar Capstone Ideas

Connect

I write regularly on Substack and welcome LinkedIn connections from people I have met. Email: pisan@uw.edu