Data Science Summer Hangouts

Data Science Summer Hangouts

Each summer, DDDI hosts a data science workshop for undergraduates involved in research. Penn faculty members from both the natural and social sciences present work that applies data science to their research. Undergraduates also attend tutorials led by our postdocs and graduate students on data science methods.  This article by Omnia highlights some of the student experiences from the 2019 hangouts. Here are some themes we've explored in the past: 

  • 2025 - Machine learning, statistics, optimization, and generative AI for scientific discovery across fields.
  • 2024 - Causal inference, machine learning, and generative AI for scientific discovery across fields.
  • 2023 - A “choose your own adventure” through data science. 

Hangouts will be held twice a week. A pizza lunch will be provided. All talks and tutorials will take place in the RDDSX space, conveniently located near the Collaborative Classroom in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. Below you'll find our past hangouts with recordings. 

Upcoming Summer Hangouts

No events are currently scheduled.
Please check back soon.

Past Summer Hangouts

Summer Hangouts: Carolina Torreblanca

Causal Thinking in Social Science

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

You can also join via Zoom — Join us on Zoom!

An introduction to causal reasoning in social science, covering counterfactual logic, common pitfalls, and methods from experiments to design-based approaches.
photo of Carolina Torreblanca

Summer Hangouts: Taro (Xiaozhi) Yang

Using Language Models as A Psychological Instrument

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

You can also join via Zoom — Join us on Zoom!

A tutorial on using large language models as psychological instruments to measure and analyze human values, beliefs, and decision processes from natural language data.
Photo of Taro

Summer Hangouts: Melanie Segado

The Cloud is Just Someone Else's Computer

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

You can also join via Zoom — Join us on Zoom!

An interactive session on the relationship between the software we use locally, the things we run remotely, and the underlying hardware.
Photo for Melanie

Summer Hangouts: Tess Cherlin

HackTheScan: Fine-Tuning Foundation Models for Clinical Imaging

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

You can also join via Zoom — Join us on Zoom!

A hands-on hackathon where participants fine-tune MedSAM, a foundation vision model, for clinical imaging tasks in the context of PMOS diagnosis.
Photo of Tess

Summer Hangouts: Luis Morales-Navarro

Training very small language models on device

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

You can also join via Zoom — Join us on Zoom!

A hands-on tutorial on training and running small language models locally using nanoGPT and transformers.js, no GPU required to participate.
photo of Luis Morales-Navarro

Data Science Summer Hangouts Series 2026

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

DDDI's 2026 Summer Hangouts program offers students the opportunity to participate in informal, hands-on tutorials led by our postdoctoral research fellows.
plot of the butterfly curve

Summer Hangouts: Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung

Designing and Deploying AI in Public Systems: Evidence from Healthcare and Education

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, First Floor map

You can also join via Zoom — Join us on Zoom!

A real-world look at designing and deploying AI systems in public health and education, drawing on case studies from Sierra Leone and Taiwan.
photo of Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung

Summer Hangouts: Supranta S. Boruah

Diffusion Models in Action: From Toy Problems to Dark Matter Maps

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools in generative modeling, achieving impressive results across different domains. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how these models can be adapted to tackle a cosmological challenge: mapping dark matter in the Universe.

Summer Hangouts: Sourav Dey

Bayesian optimization, with applications in chemical reaction discovery and optimization

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

Machine learning in the low data regime. How do you find the optimal solution to a problem when the objective function is expensive to evaluate. We will also discuss how to optimize these types of black box functions in a sparse space.

Summer Hangouts: Coby Viner

Speeding up science: GNU Parallel for bioinformatics and beyond

RDDSX space outside the Collaborative Classroom
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

This session introduces GNU Parallel—the shell utility that can launch thousands of jobs simultaneously, harnessing every CPU core (or even multiple machines) with a single command.