Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology

Join us for an engaging 3-day introductory workshop designed to provide hands-on experience in getting started with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The program will feature practical exercises and real-world examples, with a special focus on applications relevant to a wide range of biological problems.

From August 12th through 14th, from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. each day, we will hold interactive, hands-on sessions for a group limited to 50 participants. Registration is $25, first come, first served

August 12: Fundamentals

Attendees will be introduced to scientific computing using Python. The materials will focus on the mathematical and computational fundamentals necessary to understand how basic neural networks are built.

10:00 - 11:00 Python fundamentals, numpy, and scipy
11:00 - 12:00 Hands-on problems
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00 Programming basics
2:00 - 3:00 Hands-on problems

August 13: Architectures

Leveraging their understanding of fundamentals, attendees will work with the core objects of Pytorch, a Python package for deep learning. Topics will include basic architectures, like multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, and transformers, as well as model training and optimization.

10:00 - 11:00 Deep learning  models
11:00 - 12:00 Hands-on problems
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00 Optimization, training, testing, logging
2:00 - 3:00 Hands-on problems

August 14: Foundation models

Complex deep learning architectures trained on enormous amounts of data have produced foundation models, such as ChatGPT for language and the Segment Anything Model for computer vision, that have achieved extraordinary results in scientific research. Attendees will learn to fine-tune such foundation models to design custom pipelines for their own work with the help of code generation tools.

10:00 - 11:00 Language models
11:00 - 12:00 Hands-on problems
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00 Vision models
2:00 - 3:00 Hands-on problems