AI in Practice Summer Institute 2026

27 July - 31 July Seattle, WA
A guided journey through the AI research lifecycle

Helpers needed!

Do you have skills in applying AI methods for research? Are you interested in sharing your knowledge to help others advance their work? Applications are closed but we are looking for event helpers with technical expertise.

About AI in Practice Summer Institute

Join us for a week of hands-on training in AI methods for research, facilitated project work, and self-directed learning. The AI in Practice Summer Institute is designed for researchers looking to move beyond textbook examples and tackle the challenges of real-world applications.

Who should apply?

  • Open to participants from any discipline.
  • Aimed at researchers willing to apply AI methods in their work, i.e. PhD students, postdocs, research faculty and staff, and Master's or undergraduate students who are already involved in research.

Prerequisites:

  • Programming experience in a scripting language such as Python or R.
  • Familiarity with one or more machine learning approaches, such as logistic regression or random forests.

Registration Fees:

  • UW Student: $30
  • UW Postdoc: $50
  • UW Faculty/Staff: $100
  • Non-UW: $200

Key Dates:

  • Application Deadline: June 15, 2026, 11:59 pm PDT
  • Notification Date: July 1, 2026

Tutorials

Tutorials

The tutorials will provide a broad overview of modern AI methods and tools for research, and will include hands-on examples in Python. We offer an optional AI Foundations Day during which participants will learn how neural networks are trained and evaluated, how vision and sequence models work, and how transfer learning lets researchers build on pretrained models rather than starting from scratch. Follow-up tutorials will illustrate best practices for applying these approaches across a full AI research lifecycle. Other topics will include foundation models, and the practicalities of scaling training and deployment. Dedicated sessions also address how to interpret AI results rigorously and make AI-based research reproducible.

Projects

Participants will be invited to develop their own ideas for project work, ideally building on an existing research project, exploring a new direction, or working directly with concepts from Day 1 to solidify learning. Throughout the week, participants will apply what they learn to their projects, with instructors and assistants available for guidance. We encourage participants working on similar problems to collaborate and learn from each other. On the final day, participants will share their progress and define a concrete plan for continuing the work after the event.

Projects

More Information

Still have questions? Visit our FAQ page for additional details!

Tentative Schedule

All times listed below are UTC -7 (Pacific Daylight Time). You might want to consult this Time Zone Map to figure out times in your location.

9:00 - 9:15

Welcome

9:15 - 10:15

Introduction to Neural Networks

Training and evaluation workflow, loss function, stochastic gradient descent, fully connected networks

10:15 - 10:30

Q&A

10:30 - 10:45

BREAK

10:45 - 11:45

Vision Models

CNNs, computer vision tasks

11:45 - 12:00

Q&A

12:00 - 13:00

LUNCH

13:00 - 14:00

Sequence Models

RNNs, LSTMs, time series tasks

14:00 - 14:15

Q&A

14:15 - 14:30

BREAK

14:30 - 15:30

Transfer Learning

Freezing layers, embeddings, fine-tuning

15:30 - 15:45

Q&A

15:45 - 16:00

BREAK

16:00 - 17:00

Project Consulting (Optional)

9:00 - 9:15

Introduction + Code of Conduct

9:15 - 9:45

AI Lifecycle Overview

9:45 - 10:15

Ice Breaker

10:15 - 11:15

Language Models with Transformers

11:20 - 12:00

Multimodal Models

Vision transformers, contrastive language-image pretraining

12:00 - 13:00

LUNCH

13:00 - 14:00

Hugging Face Ecosystem

Loading pretrained models, fine-tuning

14:15 - 15:45

Project Introduction & Scoping

15:45 - 17:00

Project Consulting

9:00 - 10:00

Scaling AI

SkyPilot: scaling workflows on any infrastructure

10:00 - 10:30

Computing Resources Overview

Overview of available resources to UW researchers: Hyak, Tillicum, cloud credits

10:30 - 10:45

BREAK

10:45 - 12:00

Project work

12:00 - 13:00

LUNCH

13:00 - 14:00

GenAI for Software Development

14:00 - 17:00

Project work

9:00 - 10:00

Communicating Results/Interpretability

10:00 - 10:15

BREAK

10:15 - 12:00

Project work

12:00 - 13:00

LUNCH

13:00 - 14:00

Improving Project Reproducibility

14:00 - 17:00

Project work

9:00 - 9:15

Feedback

9:15 - 12:00

Project work

12:00 - 13:00

LUNCH

13:00 - 14:00

Project work / wrap-up

14:00 - 16:00

Poster Session/Lightning talk session

16:00 - 16:30

Discussion & Closing


Meet the team

The people on this page have helped organize the workshop. You'll find a few specializations listed per person if you're wondering who to reach out to during the event!
Anthony Arendt
Senior Data Science Fellow
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Joseph Hellerstein
Senior Data Science Fellow
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Mark Welden-Smith
Program Manager
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Scott Henderson
Research Scientist
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Valentina Staneva
Senior Research Scientist
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Vedant Somani
Text Mining Specialist
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Our Sponsors

eScience Institute