Past Events

Past Events

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

Undergraduate Research Lunch

Research Data & Digital Scholarship Exchange Collaboration Space 

Van Pelt Library First Floor

Hosted by the Data Driven Discovery Initiative, this event will take place on May 1, 2026 from 12:00–1:30 PM in the RDDS Collaboration Space at Van Pelt Library. It will feature lightning talks highlighting exceptional undergraduate research, along with free pizza for attendees.
Undergraduate research lunch flyer

Penn AI Seminar featuring Pengtao Xie (UCSD)

Foundation Models and Generative AI for Medical Imaging Segmentation in Ultra-Low Data Regimes

Amy Gutman Hall, Room 414
Also on Zoom

Semantic segmentation of medical images is pivotal in disease diagnosis and treatment planning. While deep learning has excelled in automating this task, a major hurdle is the need for numerous annotated masks, which are resource-intensive to produce due to the required expertise…
headshot of Pengtao Xie

AI + Us featuring Konrad Kording

AI is everywhere, but talking about it doesn’t take a PhD

The Garage at Yards Brewery
500 Spring Garden St.
Philadelphia, PA 19123

Open to everyone (21 and over)

AI + Us is a new Penn AI/Data Driven Discovery Initiative series bringing big ideas about artificial intelligence out of academia and into the world. Join us at Yards Brewery for our second event featuring Perelman School of Medicine and Penn Engineering's PIK Professor Konrad…
Konrad Kording with arms crossed, facing slightly toward the left