Please join Charlottesville Data Science on the evening of Wednesday, November 11 for the talk How AI Systems Leak the Data They’re Built On from Hunter Moore, co-founder and CTO of Hardshell, a Charlottesville-based AI security startup. In his talk, Hunter will walk through how deployed AI systems are attacked in practice, using real-world case studies to explore indirect prompt injection, system prompt extraction, and privacy attacks that induce a model to divulge sensitive data.

More Details and RSVP

​We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia. We look forward to seeing you there!

About the talk

Retrieval-augmented generation made it easy to point a language model at an organization’s documents. It also made every one of those documents a potential instruction. Sure, the model was trained to refuse harmful requests, but what happens when the attack arrives inside an email, a web page, or a PDF the system retrieves on its own?

This talk walks through how deployed AI systems are attacked in practice – indirect prompt injection, data exfiltration through rendered output, system prompt extraction, and privacy attacks that pull sensitive data back out of a model. Each one is grounded in a real case, from hidden web text that hijacked Bing Chat to the ruling that held Air Canada responsible for what its chatbot told a customer. We will close with which defenses hold up, which ones break under an adaptive attacker, and what a data science team can do about it right away.

No security background required. Familiarity with LLMs and RAG will help.

About the speaker

Dr. Hunter Moore is the founder and CTO of Hardshell. He holds a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, with expertise spanning AI security, machine learning, and autonomous systems.

He has over five years of experience advising the U.S. Department of Defense on AI security, including contributions to foundational policy and protocol development at the Joint AI Center and the Chief Digital and AI Office. His work has encompassed domains such as trustworthy and robust AI, generative AI, predictive and explanatory modeling, reinforcement learning, human systems, and systems engineering of autonomous systems.

He has taught AI-related courses for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), and the University of Virginia, where he also designed and delivers a graduate-level AI security course and supervises capstone teams on trustworthy AI and AI security related topics.

Call for Demos: Show Us Your Agent Skills

Are you using AI agents in your data-centric workflows? If so, how? What’s working, and what’s not? Consider giving a quick demo of your agentic AI skills at a future Charlottesville Data Science event!

One of my favorite data science podcasts is Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson. This year, Hugo has been running an excellent series called Show Us Your (Agent) Skills, in which long-time Python, ML, AI, and data builders show how they’re actually using AI agents today. I’d love to replicate this idea within the Charlottesville Data Science community.

If you’re using AI agents to assist with data analysis, machine learning development, data engineering, or any other data-centric workflow, and you’re game to give a brief demo for your fellow community members in a friendly environment, we’d love to hear from you. Please submit your idea through the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Wednesday, October 28: Cville AI Explorers hosts Ain’t Misbehavin’: Keeping AI Agents Out of Trouble at Studio IX. Ben Cutter of Hardshell and Carson Sweet will compare training an agent to behave safely with putting technical controls around what it can do. They’ll cover guardrails and practical sandboxing for local agents, and test both on a deliberately troublesome agent.

Friday, October 30: University of Chicago professor Chenhao Tan, who directs the Chicago Human+AI Lab, gives the colloquium Science in the Age of AI at the UVA School of Data Science. He’ll look at what happens to peer review as AI-generated research grows, at the capabilities and limits of autonomous “AI scientists,” and at how the scientific ecosystem may need to change to realize AI’s promise for discovery.

Thursday, November 5: UVA’s digital humanities community hosts Princeton’s Meredith Martin, director of Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities, for the free public lecture Reading Poetry’s Data in Bryan Hall. Drawing on her book Poetry’s Data, Martin argues that working carefully with large, messy humanities corpora is good training for using AI in research. She’ll make the case for knowing what you’re searching in as well as what you’re searching for.

Wednesday, November 11: Charlottesville Data Science hosts our November event at Vault Virginia. Hunter Moore, co-founder of Hardshell, a Charlottesville-based AI startup, will present the talk How AI Systems Leak the Data They’re Built On. The presentation will explore how motivated users can easily induce AI systems to disclose sensitive information from their training data and retrieval corpus.

Friday, November 13: UVA Data Science hosts Datapalooza 2026, their signature annual event showcasing research and industry trends across Grounds and the greater data science community. This year’s Datapalooza will focus on what the future of work looks like when data, AI, and human expertise come together.

Tuesday, November 17: rvatech/ holds its annual rvatech/Women in Technology Conference at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.

Wednesday–Thursday, November 18–19: UVA’s Contemplative Sciences Center hosts AI Anxiety + Human Flourishing, a two-day public symposium on preparing young adults for a future with AI. Speakers include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, AI ethics researcher David Danks, and UVA President Scott Beardsley.

Tuesday, December 1: The Tom Tom Foundation hosts The Infrastructure of Tomorrow: Data Centers, AI, and Virginia’s Future, a conversation with State Senator Creigh Deeds and Delegate Katrina Callsen about whether Virginia can remain a leader in the digital infrastructure economy — while also protecting affordability, sustainability, and the long-term interests of its communities.

Friday, December 4: The LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business at UVA Darden hosts its fourth annual UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business at The Forum Hotel, bringing together leaders from business, technology, and policy to talk about adopting AI responsibly. This year’s theme is “The AI Readiness Imperative: Preparing People & Organizations for Responsible AI.”

Are you using AI agents in your data science and data engineering workflows? If so, how? What’s working, and what’s not? Consider showing off your agentic AI skills at a future Charlottesville Data Science event!

One of my favorite data science podcasts is Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson. This year, Hugo has been running an excellent series called Show Us Your (Agent) Skills, in which researchers and developers building with Python, ML, and AI show how they’re actually using AI agents today. I’d love to replicate this idea within the Charlottesville Data Science community.

If you’re using AI agents to assist with data analysis, machine learning development, data engineering, or any other data-heavy workflow, and you’re game to give a demo for your fellow community members in a friendly environment, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to us directly, or submit your idea through the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals!

Go to the Call for Proposals

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Friday, October 16: The Interpretability for AI Safety and Science Research Interest Group hosts the final presentations from their AI interpretability hackathon at the UVA School of Data Science. The day will feature lightning talks from faculty members, a keynote from Greg Frank of MaceAI, and presentations from the competing teams.

Friday, October 16: Momin Malik, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic, speaks at the UVA School of Data Science on Anti-positivist data science, and applications to healthcare AI. The talk connects critical perspectives on quantification with practical questions about why healthcare AI classifiers fail to generalize, drift over time, or don't improve patient outcomes.

Tuesday, October 20: UVA's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab hosts a lunchtime talk at Bond House on Bologna’s Civic Digital Twin: Democratic Practices for Urban Simulation and Action. Speakers from the City of Bologna and Fondazione Bruno Kessler will discuss how the city is building urban simulation and modeling tools with democratic governance built in.

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

Wednesday, October 28: Cville AI Explorers hosts Ain’t Misbehavin’: Keeping AI Agents Out of Trouble at Studio IX. Ben Cutter of Hardshell and Carson Sweet will compare training an agent to behave safely with putting technical controls around what it can do. They’ll cover guardrails and practical sandboxing for local agents, and test both on a deliberately troublesome agent.

Wednesday, November 11: Charlottesville Data Science hosts our November event at Vault Virginia. Hunter Moore, co-founder of Hardshell, a Charlottesville-based AI startup, will present the talk How AI Systems Leak the Data They’re Built On. The presentation will explore how motivated users can easily induce AI systems to disclose sensitive information from their training data and retrieval corpus.

Friday, November 13: UVA Data Science hosts Datapalooza 2026, their signature annual event showcasing research and industry trends across Grounds and the greater data science community. This year’s Datapalooza will focus on what the future of work looks like when data, AI, and human expertise come together.

Tuesday, November 17: rvatech/ holds its annual rvatech/Women in Technology Conference at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.

Wednesday–Thursday, November 18–19: UVA's Contemplative Sciences Center hosts AI Anxiety + Human Flourishing, a two-day public symposium on preparing young adults for a future with AI. Speakers include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, AI ethics researcher David Danks, and UVA President Scott Beardsley.

Tuesday, December 1: The Tom Tom Foundation hosts The Infrastructure of Tomorrow: Data Centers, AI, and Virginia’s Future, a conversation with State Senator Creigh Deeds and Delegate Katrina Callsen about whether Virginia can remain a leader in the digital infrastructure economy — while also protecting affordability, sustainability, and the long-term interests of its communities.

Friday, December 4: The LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business at UVA Darden hosts its fourth annual UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business at The Forum Hotel, bringing together leaders from business, technology, and policy to talk about adopting AI responsibly. This year’s theme is “The AI Readiness Imperative: Preparing People & Organizations for Responsible AI.”

Thanks for joining us last Thursday for Charlottesville Data Science’s October event, Accuracy Isn’t Everything: Good Models are Lurking Everywhere featuring Evzenie Coupkova. The talk was a tour of recent research around Rashomon sets, dataset complexity, and what they mean for generalization and training time in neural networks. It featured some genuinely surprising results, such as that for certain well-known example datasets, a meaningful fraction of randomly generated neural networks can achieve a classification accuracy of over 90%!

If you’d like to review Evzenie’s slides, they’re available below. Stay tuned for updates about the next round of Charlottesville Data Science events in the coming months!

View the Slides

Show Us Your Agent Skills: Charlottesville Data Science Edition

Are you using AI agents in your data science and data engineering workflows? If so, how? What’s working, and what’s not? Consider showing off your agentic AI skills at a future Charlottesville Data Science event!

One of my favorite data science podcasts is Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson. This year, Hugo has been running an excellent series called Show Us Your (Agent) Skills, in which long-time Python, ML, AI, and data builders show how they’re actually using AI agents today. I’d love to replicate this idea within the Charlottesville Data Science community.

If you’re using AI agents to assist with data analysis, machine learning development, data engineering, or any other data-heavy workflow, and you’re game to give a demo for your fellow community members in a friendly environment, we’d love to hear from you. Please submit your idea through the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals!

Go to the Call for Proposals

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Friday, October 16: The Interpretability for AI Safety and Science Research Interest Group hosts the final presentations from their AI interpretability hackathon at the UVA School of Data Science. The day will feature lightning talks from faculty members, a keynote from Greg Frank of MaceAI, and presentations from the competing teams.

Friday, October 16: Momin Malik, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic, speaks at the UVA School of Data Science on Anti-positivist data science, and applications to healthcare AI. The talk connects critical perspectives on quantification with practical questions about why healthcare AI classifiers fail to generalize, drift over time, or don't improve patient outcomes.

Tuesday, October 20: UVA's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab hosts a lunchtime talk at Bond House on Bologna’s Civic Digital Twin: Democratic Practices for Urban Simulation and Action. Speakers from the City of Bologna and Fondazione Bruno Kessler will discuss how the city is building urban simulation and modeling tools with democratic governance built in.

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

Wednesday, November 11: Charlottesville Data Science hosts our November event at Vault Virginia. Hunter Moore, co-founder of Hardshell, a Charlottesville-based AI startup, will present the talk How AI Systems Leak the Data They’re Built On. The presentation will explore how motivated users can easily induce AI systems to disclose sensitive information from their training data and retrieval corpus.

Friday, November 13: UVA Data Science hosts Datapalooza 2026, their signature annual event showcasing research and industry trends across Grounds and the greater data science community. This year’s Datapalooza will focus on what the future of work looks like when data, AI, and human expertise come together.

Tuesday, November 17: rvatech/ holds its annual rvatech/Women in Technology Conference at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.

Wednesday–Thursday, November 18–19: UVA's Contemplative Sciences Center hosts AI Anxiety + Human Flourishing, a two-day public symposium on preparing young adults for a future with AI. Speakers include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, AI ethics researcher David Danks, and UVA President Scott Beardsley.

Tuesday, December 1: The Tom Tom Foundation hosts The Infrastructure of Tomorrow: Data Centers, AI, and Virginia’s Future, a conversation with State Senator Creigh Deeds and Delegate Katrina Callsen about whether Virginia can remain a leader in the digital infrastructure economy — while also protecting affordability, sustainability, and the long-term interests of its communities.

Friday, December 4: The LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business at UVA Darden hosts its fourth annual UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business at The Forum Hotel, bringing together leaders from business, technology, and policy to talk about adopting AI responsibly. This year’s theme is “The AI Readiness Imperative: Preparing People & Organizations for Responsible AI.”

Please join Charlottesville Data Science tomorrow evening for the talk Accuracy Isn’t Everything: Good Models are Lurking Everywhere from Evzenie Coupkova, a mathematics PhD from Purdue. In this talk, instead of focusing on one “best” model, Evzenie will explore the broad landscape of possible models, consider what it means for a machine learning model to be “good” for a given problem, and examine the trade-offs between predictive accuracy and other desirable characteristics, like generalization and interpretability.

We’ll be gathering in person at the UVA School of Data Science. We look forward to seeing you there!

More Details and RSVP

Show Us Your Agent Skills: Charlottesville Data Science Edition

Are you using AI agents in your data science and data engineering workflows? If so, how? What’s working, and what’s not? Consider showing off your agentic AI skills at a future Charlottesville Data Science event!

One of my favorite data science podcasts is Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson. This year, Hugo has been running an excellent series called Show Us Your (Agent) Skills, in which long-time Python, ML, AI, and data builders show how they’re actually using AI agents today. I’d love to replicate this idea within the Charlottesville Data Science community.

If you’re using AI agents for data analysis, machine learning development, data engineering, or anything else data-related, and you’re game to show them off for your fellow community members in a friendly environment, we’d love to hear from you. You can simply reply to this email, or submit your idea through the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals.

Go to the Call for Proposals

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Friday, October 9: The Brain Research Interest Group at the UVA School of Data Science hosts the Brain Imaging Analytics Symposium, a half-day event featuring a keynote from NIMH’s Peter Bandettini and research sessions on the intersection of neuroscience and data science.

Friday, October 9: Professor Alex Gates gives the research talk When Are Pairs Enough? Networks, Groups, and the Organization of Science at the UVA School of Data Science. He’ll look at when a pairwise network can actually capture how groups are composed, and when it can't, using studies of scientific collaboration.

Friday, October 16: Momin Malik, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic, speaks at the UVA School of Data Science on Anti-positivist data science, and applications to healthcare AI. The talk connects critical perspectives on quantification with practical questions about why healthcare AI classifiers fail to generalize, drift over time, or don't improve patient outcomes.

Tuesday, October 20: UVA's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab hosts a lunchtime talk at Bond House on Bologna’s Civic Digital Twin: Democratic Practices for Urban Simulation and Action. Speakers from the City of Bologna and Fondazione Bruno Kessler will discuss how the city is building urban simulation and modeling tools with democratic governance built in.

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

Tuesday, November 17: rvatech holds its annual rvatech/Women in Technology Conference at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.

Wednesday–Thursday, November 18–19: UVA's Contemplative Sciences Center hosts AI Anxiety + Human Flourishing, a two-day public symposium on preparing young adults for a future with AI. Speakers include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, AI ethics researcher David Danks, and UVA President Scott Beardsley.

Tuesday, December 1: The Tom Tom Foundation hosts The Infrastructure of Tomorrow: Data Centers, AI, and Virginia’s Future, a conversation with State Senator Creigh Deeds and Delegate Katrina Callsen about whether Virginia can remain a leader in the digital infrastructure economy — while also protecting affordability, sustainability, and the long-term interests of its communities.

Friday, December 4: The LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business at UVA Darden hosts its fourth annual UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business at The Forum Hotel. This year’s theme is “The AI Readiness Imperative: Preparing People & Organizations for Responsible AI,” and it brings together leaders from business, technology, and policy to talk about adopting AI responsibly.

beCamp 2026 is almost here, and we just hit 120 registrations! Are you signed up yet? If you’re interested in data, tech, product, design, or another creative field in the Charlottesville area, you probably should be. We’re going to cap registration soon, so if you’ve been thinking about it, go ahead and sign up now!

If you haven’t been before, beCamp is a conference planned by the people who show up. There are no pre-selected speakers or sessions. Participants collaboratively build the conference agenda together.

We’ll gather on the evening of Friday, October 2 to pitch sessions, vote for our favorites, and assemble the conference schedule. Then, on Saturday, October 3, we’ll reconvene and run the conference we just planned the day before!

beCamp is completely free to attend. There’s no better way to connect with the local tech community, share what you’re interested in, and learn something new!

More Info & Register

The day before beCamp, AFCEA Central Virginia’s Data Centric Summit (DCS) will take over the CODE Building’s Irving Theater on Thursday, October 1. This year’s DCS will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Two of the speakers in the DCS 2026 program — Hunter Moore and Cory Everington — were featured panelists in Charlottesville Data Science’s Breaking Into Data Science and AI Engineering event last month!

Whether you work in cybersecurity, analytics, AI/ML, mission systems, infrastructure, or public-sector governance, the 2026 Summit offers a unique opportunity to connect with experts and peers who are redefining what it means to be data‑centric in complex operational environments.

More Info & Register

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, September 29: Cville AI Explorers hosts an AI Design Bake-Off at Studio IX. The group will split into small teams, then spend 45 minutes redesigning the Cville AI Explorers website using a variety of AI front-end design tools. No previous design experience required.

Thursday, October 8: Charlottesville Data Science hosts our October event, Accuracy Isn’t Everything: Good Models are Lurking Everywhere, at the UVA School of Data Science. In this talk, Evzenie Coupkova, a mathematics PhD from Purdue, will explore the broad landscape of possible models, consider what it means for a machine learning model to be “good” for a given problem, and examine the trade-offs between predictive accuracy and other desirable characteristics, like generalization and interpretability.

Friday, October 9: The Brain Research Interest Group at the UVA School of Data Science hosts the Brain Imaging Analytics Symposium, a half-day event featuring a keynote from NIMH’s Peter Bandettini and research sessions on the intersection of neuroscience and data science.

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

Please join Charlottesville Data Science for the talk Accuracy Isn’t Everything: Good Models are Lurking Everywhere from Evzenie Coupkova, a mathematics PhD from Purdue. In this talk, instead of focusing on one “best” model, Evzenie will explore the broad landscape of possible models, consider what it means for a machine learning model to be “good” for a given problem, and examine the trade-offs between predictive accuracy and other desirable characteristics, like generalization and interpretability.

​We’ll be gathering in person at the UVA School of Data Science on the evening of Thursday, October 8. We look forward to seeing you there!

More Details and RSVP

beCamp 2026 is less than three weeks away

beCamp 2026, Charlottesville’s annual “un-conference”, is less than three weeks away! If you haven’t been before, beCamp is a conference planned by the people who show up. There are no pre-selected speakers or sessions. Participants collaboratively build the conference agenda together.

We’ll gather on the evening of Friday, October 2 to pitch sessions, vote for our favorites, and assemble the conference schedule. Then, on Saturday, October 3, we’ll reconvene and run the conference we just planned the day before!

beCamp is completely free to attend. There’s no better way to connect with the local tech community, share what you’re interested in, and learn something new!

More Info & Register

434 Startup Series

Are you thinking about founding a tech startup? If so, check out the Startup Series from 434, Charlottesville’s startup accelerator. The Startup Series will provide you with a background in and some experience with the “nuts and bolts” of starting, funding, and managing a scalable, tech-driven company.

The first session starts today, and additional sessions will run each Monday for the next seven weeks. Sessions are free and lunch is provided.

RSVP for the 434 Startup Series

Cool stuff from the Charlottesville Data Science community

Mike Pfaffenberger, an AI Engineer at Pydantic, published Linguistic Drift at the Frontier, an article exploring how frontier LLMs are influencing language use over time, possibly in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Carson Sweet published The Agentic Thundering Herd, an article exploring how AI agents can exhibit emergent “herding” behavior, and how to mitigate it.

Andrew Boyd of Standard Agents figured out how to get Apple Touch ID hardware working with Linux — a technical feat that’s apparently never been done. Not “data science”, per se, but still cool!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its fifth annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Friday, September 18: The UVA School of Data Science hosts Ranking in Networks: Models, Leadership, and AI Preferences, a talk by Jean-Gabriel Young of the University of Vermont. The talk explores extending Bradley-Terry ranking models, including a look at how large language models often hold multiple, internally inconsistent preference orderings rather than one latent ranking.

Friday, September 18 – Saturday, September 19: UVA’s Department of Systems and Information Engineering celebrates its 50th anniversary with an open house, networking receptions, and interactive sessions spread over two days.

Thursday, September 24: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup holds an online event called Rust Cells — Interior Mutability from Rust Core to Tock OS, providing a look at Rust's cell types and how they solve embedded-systems problems in the Tock operating system.

Tuesday, September 29: Cville AI Explorers hosts an AI Design Bake-Off at Studio IX. The group will split into small teams, then spend 45 minutes redesigning the Cville AI Explorers website using a variety of AI front-end design tools. No previous design experience required.

Thursday, October 1: AFCEA Central Virginia (CeVA) holds its third annual Data Centric Summit (DCS26) at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. The summit will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene, returns for its 20th year. beCamp is Charlottesville’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Join fellow members of the Charlottesville tech community to connect, share, and spend a day learning something new. There’s nothing else quite like beCamp in town!

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

Thanks again for joining us for last week’s Breaking Into Data Science & AI Engineering panel discussion with Charlottesville Data Science and Cville AI Explorers! With 70+ in attendance, this was our largest monthly event in years, and it was excellent to see a roughly even mix between UVA students, faculty, and staff and members of the regional tech community at large.

Special thanks to our panelists Hunter Moore, Luke Kang, Miriam Friedel, and Cory Everington for sharing their insights and advice, and to the UVA School of Data Science for hosting us and for providing the pizza.

We’ll be back with our next Charlottesville Data Science event in October. In the meantime, check out beCamp 2026, or one of the other events in the “More upcoming events around Charlottesville” section below. It’s going to be a busy fall in the data science, AI, and machine learning scene in Charlottesville!

Registration for beCamp 2026 now open

Registration is officially open for beCamp 2026, Charlottesville’s annual “un-conference”. beCamp is one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology community. This year is a particularly special one, as beCamp is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

If you haven't been before, beCamp is a conference planned by the people who show up. There are no pre-selected speakers or sessions. Participants collaboratively build the conference agenda together.

Anyone can pitch a session about anything you’re interested in speaking or learning about. Sessions from previous years have covered everything from deeply technical topics to drone racing to ranked-choice voting to baking the perfect loaf of sourdough.

We’ll gather on the evening of Friday, October 2 to pitch sessions, vote for our favorites, and assemble the conference schedule. Then, on Saturday, October 3, we’ll reconvene and run the conference we just planned the day before!

beCamp is completely free to attend. There’s no better way to connect with the local tech community, share what you’re interested in, and learn something new!

More Info & Register

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Wednesday, September 2: Over in Richmond, RVA Data Enthusiasts hosts The Future of Data is Agentic at Ippon Technologies. Drawing on real-world case studies, Peter Bilzerian of MPP Insights explores “Agentic BI” and discusses what AI actually changes about the work of data engineers andBI developers — and what it doesn’t.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 10: UVA Data Science professor Mona Sloane hosts a panel discussion at the UVA School of Law to launch her new book, Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its fifth annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Friday, September 18 – Saturday, September 19: UVA’s Department of Systems and Information Engineering celebrates its 50th anniversary with an open house, networking receptions, and interactive sessions spread over two days.

Thursday, October 1: AFCEA Central Virginia (CeVA) holds its third annual Data Centric Summit (DCS26) at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. The summit will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene, returns for its 20th year. beCamp is Charlottesville’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Join fellow members of the Charlottesville tech community to connect, share, and spend a day learning something new. There’s nothing else quite like beCamp in town!

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at the UVA School of Data Science this evening for our Breaking Into Data Science & AI Engineering panel discussion! We’ve assembled a panel of experienced data scientists, AI engineers, and team leaders willing to share their advice and perspectives on what it takes to land your first (or next!) job in the field. Head over to Luma to RSVP if you haven’t already!

More Details & RSVP

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Wednesday, September 2: Over in Richmond, RVA Data Enthusiasts hosts The Future of Data is Agentic at Ippon Technologies. Drawing on real-world case studies, Peter Bilzerian of MPP Insights explores “Agentic BI” and discusses what AI actually changes about the work of data engineers andBI developers — and what it doesn’t.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 10: UVA Data Science professor Mona Sloane hosts a panel discussion at the UVA School of Law to launch her new book, Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its fifth annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Friday, September 18 – Saturday, September 19: UVA’s Department of Systems and Information Engineering celebrates its 50th anniversary with an open house, networking receptions, and interactive sessions spread over two days.

Thursday, October 1: AFCEA Central Virginia (CeVA) holds its third annual Data Centric Summit (DCS26) at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. The summit will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene, returns for its 20th year. beCamp is Charlottesville’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Join fellow members of the Charlottesville tech community to connect, share, and spend a day learning something new. There’s nothing else quite like beCamp in town!

Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.

​We’re happy to share that a Luke Kang, a Senior Data Scientist at Procter & Gamble and a UVA Data Science graduate, will join us as a fourth panelist for Charlottesville Data Science’s Breaking Into Data Science & AI Engineering panel discussion next week.

​Please join us at the UVA School of Data Science to hear advice and perspectives from all of the seasoned data scientists, AI engineers, and team leaders on our panel about what it takes to land your first (or next!) job in the field. We look forward to seeing you there!

More Details and RSVP

Registration for beCamp 2026 now open

Registration is officially open for beCamp 2026, Charlottesville’s annual “un-conference”. beCamp is one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology community. This year is a particularly special one, as beCamp is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

If you haven't been before, beCamp is a conference planned by the people who show up. There are no pre-selected speakers or sessions. Participants collaboratively build the conference agenda together.

Anyone can pitch a session about anything you’re interested in speaking or learning about. Sessions from previous years have covered everything from deeply technical topics to drone racing to ranked-choice voting to baking the perfect loaf of sourdough.

We’ll gather on the evening of Friday, October 2 to pitch sessions, vote for our favorites, and assemble the conference schedule. Then, on Saturday, October 3, we’ll reconvene and run the conference we just planned the day before!

beCamp is completely free to attend. There’s no better way to connect with the local tech community, share what you’re interested in, and learn something new!

More Info & Register

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, August 20: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup continues its Tock OS series with Wireless Communication with the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol, exploring how a Rust application can wirelessly transmit and receive radio frames.

Wednesday, September 2: Over in Richmond, RVA Data Enthusiasts hosts The Future of Data is Agentic at Ippon Technologies. Peter Bilzerian of MPP Insights explores “Agentic BI”, discusses what AI actually changes about the work of data engineers and BI developers, what it doesn’t, and draws on real-world case studies.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its fifth annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Friday, September 18 – Saturday, September 19: UVA’s Department of Systems and Information Engineering celebrates its 50th anniversary with an open house, networking receptions, and interactive sessions spread over two days.

Thursday, October 1: AFCEA Central Virginia (CeVA) holds its third annual Data Centric Summit (DCS26) at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. The summit will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene, returns for its 20th year. beCamp is Charlottesville’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Join fellow members of the Charlottesville tech community to connect, share, and spend a day learning something new. There's nothing else quite like beCamp in town!

Thanks again to everyone who joined us at Vault Virginia earlier this week for From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields. Alison Lu, a data scientist at ENSCO Rail, headlined the evening with a clear, accessible explanation of what a neural radiance field (NeRF) is, how it works, and potential commercial applications for the technique.

The slides from Alison’s talk are available here. If you’d like to reach out to her, you can find her on LinkedIn!

Prior to Alison’s talk, Carson Sweet opened with a fascinating overview of Syncog, an experimental platform he’s working on to explore how cognitive scaffolding like identity, values, affect, and multi-layer memory can enhance the AI assistant experience. Carson asked me to express his thanks to the audience for all of the great and insightful questions. If you’d like to learn more about Syncog or share your feedback, Carson would love to hear from you at cs@carsonsweet.com.

Finally, don’t forget to check out our next Charlottesville Data Science event — Breaking Into Data Science & AI Engineering — coming up on Thursday, August 27. We’re gathering a panel of seasoned data scientists, AI engineers, and team leaders to share their perspectives and advice on what it takes to land your first (or next!) job in the field.

More Details and RSVP

Please share the link with anyone you know who may be interested!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, August 20: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup continues its Tock OS series with Wireless Communication with the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol, exploring how a Rust application can wirelessly transmit and receive radio frames.

Thursday, August 27: Charlottesville Data Science and Cville AI Explorers jointly host the Breaking Into Data Science & AI Engineering panel discussion at the UVA School of Data Science. Hear from a group of experienced data scientists, AI engineers, and team leaders about how to land your first (or next) job in the field.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its fifth annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Thursday, October 1: AFCEA Central Virginia (CeVA) holds its third annual Data Centric Summit (DCS26) at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. The summit will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: Save the date for beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene. beCamp is the Charlottesville tech community’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Registration will open in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

August is a rare “blue moon” month for Charlottesville Data Science, with two events in the same month! Please join us on the evening of Thursday, August 27 at the UVA School of Data Science for a panel discussion called Breaking Into Data Science & AI Engineering. We’re convening a panel of seasoned data scientists, AI engineers, and team leaders to share their perspectives and advice on what it takes to land your first (or next!) job in the field. This event will be a joint gathering of Charlottesville Data Science and the Cville AI Explorers group.

Our panelists will include:

• ​Kerry Guerrero, Director, AI Engineering at 3E

• ​Hunter Moore, Co-Founder & CTO at Hardshell AI

• ​Cory Everington, VP, Operations at DroneTrace, previously head of Bluestone Analytics

• Luke Kang, Senior Data Scientist at Procter & Gamble

• ​Patrick Harrison, data science consultant, previously Director, AI Engineering at S&P Global

Please refer to the event page for full details and to RSVP, and please forward the link to others you know who may be interested. We look forward to seeing you there!

More Details and RSVP

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, August 20: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup continues its Tock OS series with Wireless Communication with the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol, exploring how a Rust application can wirelessly transmit and receive radio frames.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its fifth annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Thursday, October 1: AFCEA Central Virginia (CeVA) holds its third annual Data Centric Summit (DCS26) at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. The summit will focus on the technologies, architectures, and operational practices shaping the next generation of data‑driven decision-making across defense, government, and industry.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: Save the date for beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene. beCamp is the Charlottesville tech community’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Registration will open in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Please join Charlottesville Data Science tomorrow evening for our August event!

Alison Lu, a data scientist at ENSCO Rail, will present the talk From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields — exploring this breakthrough in computer vision and its applications in industry settings.

Prior to Alison’s talk, Carson Sweet will provide a brief demo of Syncog, an experimental platform he’s working on to explore how cognitive scaffolding can enhance the AI assistant experience.

More Details and RSVP

​We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the Downtown Mall. We look forward to seeing you there!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, August 20: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup continues its Tock OS series with Wireless Communication with the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol, exploring how a Rust application can wirelessly transmit and receive radio frames.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its 5th Annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: Save the date for beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene. beCamp is the Charlottesville tech community’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Registration will open in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

We’re pleased to share that Carson Sweet will provide a brief project demo prior to Alison Lu’s talk “From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields” at our Charlottesville Data Science event coming up on Tuesday. Carson will share an overview of Syncog, an experimental platform he’s working on to explore how cognitive scaffolding can enhance the AI assistant experience.

More Details and RSVP

We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the Downtown Mall. See the event page for full details and to RSVP!

About Carson’s demo

Carson Sweet will provide a brief demo of Syncog, an experimental platform he’s working on to explore how cognitive scaffolding can enhance the AI assistant experience through transparent continuity, deeper engagement with users and tasks, greater efficiency, and governed agency. Syncog’s current cognitive architecture maintains durable state, develops a history-shaped worldview, and computes continuously updated, behavior-driving signals from identity, values, goals, drives, affect, and multi-layer memory. The research program seeks to measure how external cognitive scaffolding influences LLM inference and behavior—and whether those effects are reliable, durable, and beneficial.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, August 20: Charlottesville Rust Meetup continues its Tock OS series with Wireless Communication with the IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol, exploring how a Rust application can wirelessly transmit and receive radio frames.

Friday, September 4: The UVA School of Data Science hosts an award ceremony and reception for the 2026 Data Is ART Competition. Data visualization expert Alberto Cairo will give a keynote talk, followed by the award presentation for this year’s winners. Open to the public.

Thursday, September 17: CvilleBioHub holds its 5th Annual BioDiscovery Summit, “From Spark to Scale,” at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building.

​Please join Charlottesville Data Science for the talk From Still Photos to 3D Scene: An Introduction to Neural Radiance Fields. Alison Lu, a data scientist at ENSCO Rail, will explore this breakthrough in computer vision and discuss its applications in industry settings.

​We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the evening of Tuesday, August 4. We look forward to seeing you there!

More Details and RSVP

​About the talk

​What if you could create a 3D, 360-degree scene out of a couple dozen pictures? Traditional methods of doing so may need expensive equipment, hundreds of overlapping photos, and precise location data. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), first introduced in 2020, are a breakthrough in machine vision, allowing a trained network to create a photorealistic scene on relatively small amounts of data. There is a growing set of applications for NeRF, from digital VFX to medical imaging.

​In this talk, we will go into depth on what NeRF is and how it works, as well as a genealogy of improvements and related techniques from leaders in the field. There will be a demo on how to create scenes and a discussion on adaptations to the transportation industry.

​About the speaker

​Alison Lu is a data scientist working at ENSCO Rail, a company that provides integrated technology products for railroads. She has been a part of the Charlottesville Data Science Community since 2023.

Results from last week’s community survey

Last week, we sent out a survey asking our community for their feedback about:

1. What types of events they’re most interested in attending, and

2. Which days and times work best for them.

Here are the results! n = 20, which is a solid response rate for a survey like this.

What types of Charlottesville Data Science events are you most interested in attending?

When are you most likely to attend?

The results indicate a clear preference for tech talk and show-and-tell events on weekday evenings, which is largely what we do now. This suggests either (1) we’re on the right track, and/or (2) a self-selection effect is at play, where the people who subscribe to the Charlottesville Data Science newsletter and respond to the survey are the ones who are most likely to be satisfied with the way we already do things, and people who would prefer something different aren’t represented in the sample.

In any case — thank you to those of you who responded! Maybe we’ll do more micro-surveys like this in the future to gather feedback from the community.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, July 28: Cville AI Explorers hosts their July event at Studio IX. It’s a two-for-one talk night: first, Kyle Carmitchel (Freehold Software) walks through “Building a Second Brain,” the personal AI-agent architecture he built on the Claude Agent SDK to manage email, calendars, and family logistics over iMessage. Next, Justin Schroeder of Standard Agents makes the case for small, domain-specific agents over monolithic “Swiss Army knife” ones.

Friday, October 2 – Saturday, October 3: Save the date for beCamp 2026, one of the longest-running and most storied events in the Charlottesville technology scene. beCamp is the Charlottesville tech community’s annual “unconference”, an event fully planned and run by the people who show up. Registration will open in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

After a brief pause following the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference, we’re now gearing up for the next round of Charlottesville Data Science events — and we’d love to hear your thoughts about what types of events you’d like to see!

We’ve prepared a (very) brief survey for members of the Charlottesville Data Science community to help guide us as we plan our future events. You can access it here:

Start the Survey

The survey should take you no more than one minute to complete (really!). It’s just two multiple choice questions:

1. What types of Charlottesville Data Science events are you most interested in attending? … and …

2. Which days and times are you most likely to attend?

Historically, most of our events have have been held on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday evenings, and featured conference-style talks and panel discussions. We’d like to see if we should stay the course with that format, or if there’s appetite in our community for more variety.

Have an idea for a future Charlottesville Data Science event?

Submit it to the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals! We’re always on the lookout for topics and speakers to feature at our future events. Presenting at Charlottesville Data Science is a great way to hone your skills, demonstrate your expertise, make valuable connections, and advance your career.

Go to the Call for Proposals

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, July 28: Cville AI Explorers hosts their July event at Studio IX. It’s a two-for-one talk night: first, Kyle Carmitchel (Freehold Software) walks through “Building a Second Brain,” the personal AI-agent architecture he built on the Claude Agent SDK to manage email, calendars, and family logistics over iMessage. Next, Justin Schroeder of Standard Agents makes the case for small, domain-specific agents over monolithic “Swiss Army knife” ones.

We’re pleased to share that video recordings from many sessions at the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference are now available! You can find the recordings by viewing the conference schedule and clicking through to the session detail page for any sessions you’re interested in. Check them out!

View Sessions and Recordings

Thanks again for an amazing event, and we'll see you next time!

Last call for tickets to the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference! If you've been thinking about attending the conference but haven't secured your tickets yet, there's still time. Join us for the premier annual gathering of AI engineers, data scientists, and other technical leaders in our region.

Buy Your Tickets

We can't wait to see everyone tomorrow and Saturday!

The schedule for lightning talks at the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now available! Lightning talks are fast-paced, eight-minute talks held back-to-back. We’re excited to add ten more compelling talks to an already-packed conference program:

• From Prompts to Posteriors: Agentic Bayesian A/B Testing with PyMC
  Sanjit Paliwal, Principal Data Scientist, Verizon
  

• Lessons Learned Writing Unit Tests for Chatbots
  Dean Wampler, IBM Technical Representative to The AI Alliance
  

• Calibrated Evaluation of LLM-Sourced Synthetic Data for Imbalanced Text Classification
  Vikram Kamat, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Villanova University
  

• Agents for Secondary Data Extraction

  Christopher N. Eichelberger, CDO, Castle Hill Gaming
  

• Sometimes You Just Need a Bit of Logic
  Nathan Wan, Nathan Todd, Hudson Noyes, and Jackson Kennedy, University of Virginia School of Data Science
  

• TransfersAI: Automating Credit Evaluation Behind Every Transfer Commitment

  Neel Davuluri, University of Virginia School of Data Science
  

• Vector Databases: Scaling High‑Performance Neural Search for Production AI Apps

  Kavya Tolety, Software Engineer at IFEES Inc.
  

• Why I Still Have a Feature Engineering Pipeline in 2026

  Scott Stults, Relevance Engineer, OpenSource Connections
  

• Translation Loss in LLMs

  Harsh Sharma, University of Southern California
  

• Read Burning Down the SDLC: The AI Software Factory
  Owen Zanzal, Cloud & Agentic Ops Engineer at Shoplogix

All lightning talks will be held this Saturday, April 18 at the University of Virginia School of Data Science. You will need a ticket that includes Saturday to attend (Full Conference or Saturday Only). Get yours today!

Buy Your Tickets

(Already have a Friday Only ticket and want to attend the lightning talks? Hit reply to this message and we’ll help you upgrade to a Full Conference pass.)

We’re excited to see everyone later this week!

P.S. We’d be grateful if you could share the event with friends, colleagues, and others in your network who may be interested in attending! We do our best to get the word out about the AMLC, but the #1 way attendees find out about the event is still by word of mouth from people they know.

The 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is just one week away! If you’re thinking about attending the conference but haven't got your tickets yet, now is the time. Last year’s conference sold out, so be sure to secure your tickets while they’re still available.

Buy Your Tickets

We have 42 technical talks and hands-on tutorials lined up over two days covering a wide range of topics across data science, machine learning, and AI engineering, featuring speakers from organizations like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, McAfee, S&P Global, DARPA, IBM, and many more, as well as leading universities including UVA, Virginia Tech, Georgetown, Duke, and NC State. Renowned machine learning engineer Vicki Boykis and David Luebke, co-founder of NVIDIA Research, will headline the conference.

Most sessions are targeted at data science, AI, and machine learning practitioners, but there’s plenty here for leadership-level folks and AI enthusiasts more broadly — including talks and tutorials about the novel economics of AI and what it means for organizations using and building on top of AI models, why most ML projects should fail and how to do it well, and how to ensure AI-powered systems are deployed ethically and responsibly.

Two more developments we’re excited about for this year’s event:

• We’ve added a casual networking reception at Vault Virginia for AMLC speakers and attendees immediately after the conclusion of the conference program on Friday.

• We have 11 eight-minute lightning talks lined up for Saturday, many of which seem just as compelling as our full-length talks! Stay tuned for more details about the lightning talk program.

We can’t wait to see everyone next week for the marquee annual event for the data science, AI, and machine learning community in our region!

P.S. We’d be grateful if you could share the event with friends, colleagues, and others in your network who may be interested in attending! We do our best to get the word out about the AMLC, but the #1 way attendees find out about the event is still by word of mouth from people they know.

The 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now accepting submissions for lightning talks! Lightning talks provide speakers the opportunity to deliver a brief, eight-minute talk about a topic of interest to the AMLC audience. Example topics for a lightning talk could include:

• A description of a data science, AI, or machine learning project you’ve worked on

• A brief overview of a technical architecture or methodology you think others should know about

• A demonstration of an open source software package or a data visualization technique

• Highlighting a finding from recent research

...and so on. To learn more and submit a proposal for a lightning talk, please click the link below:

Submit a Lightning Talk

The deadline to submit lightning talk proposals will be 11:59PM US ET on Monday, April 6. All lightning talks will take place on Saturday, April 18 in the Capital One Hub at the UVA School of Data Science.

We look forward to reviewing your proposals!

The 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now just over two weeks away! We have 42 technical talks and hands-on tutorials lined up over two days covering a wide range of topics across data science, machine learning, and AI engineering, featuring speakers from organizations like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, McAfee, S&P Global, DARPA, IBM, and many more, as well as leading universities including UVA, Virginia Tech, Georgetown, Duke, and NC State. Renowned machine learning engineer Vicki Boykis and David Luebke, co-founder of NVIDIA Research, will headline the conference.

Most sessions will be highly technical, but there’s plenty here for the AI-curious, too — including talks and tutorials about the novel economics of AI and what it means for organizations using and building on top of AI models, why most ML projects should fail and how to do it well, and how to ensure AI-powered systems are deployed ethically and responsibly.

Buy Your Tickets

If you’re thinking about registering for the conference, now is the time! Last year’s conference sold out, so be sure to secure your tickets while they’re still available.

P.S. We’d be grateful if you could share the event with folks in your network who may be interested in attending! We do our best to get the word out about the AMLC, but the #1 way attendees find out about the event is still by word of mouth from people they know.