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.

Order Your Shirt

2026 AMLC t-shirts are available as an optional add-on with the purchase of any conference ticket. You can order shirts from the conference registration page. If you’ve already registered for the conference but didn’t get a shirt, there’s still time! Simply place a new order for your shirt from the registration form.

Join us tonight for “Low Code Data Science”

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone this evening for Low Code Data Science: Myth, Reality, and How Organizations Really Use Tools Like KNIME. Michael Powers will kick us off with a demo of marimo, a next-generation computational notebook for Python and SQL. Keith McCormick will follow with his talk about the ecosystem for low-code and no-code data science tools, how they work in practice, and the kinds of outcomes organizations are achieving with them.

More Details and RSVP

We’ll be gathering in-person at the UVA Darden School of Business. Thanks again to Darden for hosting us!

The 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now just over three weeks away! We have 42 sessions lined up over two days featuring technical talks and hands-on tutorials from speakers at 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.

Buy Your Tickets

We’re offering Full Conference, Friday Only, and Saturday Only tickets at employer-paid, personal, and student price tiers. The conference sold out last year, so be sure to secure your tickets while they’re still available!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Monday, March 30: The Center for Open Science is offering a virtual “sneak peek” of the results from their SCORE program, a large-scale research study focused on replicability in scientific research. The results are set to be formally published next month as a series of articles in the Nature journal family. Please register here to receive the link to join this virtual event.

Tuesday, April 14: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will host Sharpening Your Rust Skills for Job Interviews, featuring Simeon Fitch, Principal Software Engineer at Datashapes AI, and Brad Campbell, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at UVA.

Friday-Saturday, April 17-18: The Applied Machine Learning Conference returns to Charlottesville. A two-day event by and for practitioners, the AMLC is the signature annual event for the data science, AI, and machine learning community in Charlottesville and the surrounding region. Ticket sales are now open, and sponsorship opportunities are also available.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow for Low Code Data Science: Myth, Reality, and How Organizations Really Use Tools Like KNIME. Michael Powers will kick us off with a demo of marimo, a next-generation computational notebook for Python and SQL. Keith McCormick will follow with his talk about the ecosystem for low-code and no-code data science tools, how they work in practice, and the kinds of outcomes organizations are achieving with them.

More Details and RSVP

We’ll be gathering in-person at the UVA Darden School of Business. Thanks again to Darden for hosting us!

​Come early for Keith’s capstone talk

​Keith McCormick currently serves as the Bodily Professorship in Analytics, which is a one-year visiting scholar role at the Darden School of Business. Keith will be giving his capstone talk in the same classroom as our event at 4:30 pm.

​Members of the Charlottesville Data Science community are invited to arrive early to attend the capstone talk. Keith will discuss his experiences at Darden during the academic year and the projects he has been working on.

The 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now just over three weeks away! We have 42 sessions lined up over two days featuring technical talks and hands-on tutorials from speakers at 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.

Buy Your Tickets

We’re offering Full Conference, Friday Only, and Saturday Only tickets at employer-paid, personal, and student price tiers. A limited edition 2026 AMLC T-Shirt is available as an optional add-on with any ticket purchase. The conference sold out last year, so be sure to secure your tickets while they’re still available!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Monday, March 30: The Center for Open Science is offering a virtual “sneak peek” of the results from their SCORE program, a large-scale research study focused on replicability in scientific research. The results are set to be formally published next month as a series of articles in the Nature journal family. Please register here to receive the link to join this virtual event.

Tuesday, April 14: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will host Sharpening Your Rust Skills for Job Interviews, featuring Simeon Fitch, Principal Software Engineer at Datashapes AI, and Brad Campbell, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at UVA.

Friday-Saturday, April 17-18: The Applied Machine Learning Conference returns to Charlottesville. A two-day event by and for practitioners, the AMLC is the signature annual event for the data science, AI, and machine learning community in Charlottesville and the surrounding region. Ticket sales are now open, and sponsorship opportunities are also available.

Today is the last day to register for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference at early bird prices! We have 42 sessions lined up over two days featuring technical talks and hands-on tutorials from speakers at organizations like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, McAfee, S&P Global, DARPA, IBM, and many more, as well as leading universities including UVA, Virginia Tech, Duke, and NC State.

Buy Your Tickets

Last year's conference sold out, so be sure to secure your tickets now before prices go up tomorrow. We can't wait to see you on April 17–18!

P.S. If you know colleagues or friends who might be interested in attending, please share this with them. 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 full schedule for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now available! We were blown away by the response to our Call for Proposals, and the result is two days of technical talks and hands-on tutorials covering production ML systems, AI agents, healthcare AI, explainability, forecasting, knowledge graphs, and much more.

View the Schedule

Friday, April 17 features keynotes from David Luebke (Co-founder of NVIDIA Research) and Vicki Boykis (founding ML engineer at Malachyte), plus four tracks of talks from speakers at organizations like Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, McAfee, S&P Global, DARPA, IBM, PagerDuty, and many more, as well as leading universities including UVA, Virginia Tech, Duke, and NC State.

Saturday, April 18 is all hands-on, with three tracks of 90-minute tutorials that dive deeper into topics such as building production-grade AI agents, agentic search, knowledge graph construction, MCP integration with real databases, probabilistic programming, physics-informed neural networks, and more.

If you’ve been waiting to register for the conference, now is the time! Early bird pricing ends this Friday, March 20.

Buy Your Tickets

We expect the conference to sell out, so be sure to secure your tickets while they’re still available. We can’t wait to see you in Charlottesville on April 17–18!

P.S. If you know colleagues or friends who might be interested in attending, please share this with them — we’d love to reach folks we might otherwise miss.

​Please join Charlottesville Data Science for our March event on the evening of Thursday, March 26. Michael Powers will kick us off with a demo of marimo, a next-generation computational notebook for Python and SQL. Keith McCormick will follow with his talk Low Code Data Science: Myth, Reality, and How Organizations Really Use Tools Like KNIME.

More Details and RSVP

​We’ll be gathering in person at UVA’s Darden School of Business.

About Michael’s demo

​Michael will introduce marimo, a next-generation computational notebook and data analysis environment for Python and SQL. marimo addresses many of the perceived shortcomings of Jupyter and similar tools. marimo feels like a notebook, but is stored as a pure Python program that’s Git-friendly, reusable as a module, executable as a script, shareable as an app, reproducible in execution and packaging, and designed for data.

​About Keith’s talk

​Low-code and no-code tools have been around since the early 1990s. These platforms allow analysts and data scientists to build end-to-end workflows—data access, preparation, modeling, and deployment—using visual pipelines rather than writing code for every step.

​But do data scientists actually embrace them? How are organizations really using these tools? And are they meant for experts—or for “citizen” data scientists?

​In this talk, we’ll step back and look at the current low-code data science ecosystem: what these tools promise, how they work in practice, and the kinds of goals organizations are achieving with them today.

​We’ll spend a few minutes looking at KNIME Analytics Platform as an example—an open-source analytics platform built around visual workflows that integrates machine learning, ETL, and visualization in a single environment, while still allowing Python or R when needed. We’ll also take a quick look at K-AI, which can generate workflows using natural language, and contrast it with other emerging forms of “vibe coding.”

​The goal is to share lessons from real-world use and spark a conversation about where the data science tooling ecosystem may be heading. There will be plenty of time for discussion and questions.

​About Keith McCormick

​Keith McCormick is a data science consultant, author, and instructor with more than 30 years of experience in predictive analytics and machine learning. He currently serves as the Bodily Bicentennial Professor of Analytics at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Keith has authored books on predictive analytics and created numerous courses on machine learning and AI for LinkedIn Learning. He works with organizations across industries to help teams effectively adopt data science and AI.

​Keith has no affiliation with KNIME beyond being a long-time user of low-code tools.

​Come early for Keith’s capstone talk

​The Bodily Professorship in Analytics is a one-year visiting scholar role at the Darden School of Business. Keith will be giving his capstone talk in the same classroom as our event at 4:30 pm.

​Members of the Charlottesville Data Science Community are invited to arrive early to attend the capstone talk. Keith will discuss his experiences at Darden during the academic year and the projects he has been working on.

Early Bird pricing for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference ends on March 20! The conference will take place on April 17–18 in Charlottesville, Virginia — now just five weeks away. We’re offering Full Conference, Friday Only, and Saturday Only tickets at employer-paid, personal, and student price tiers.

Buy Your Tickets

A limited edition 2026 AMLC T-Shirt is available as an optional add-on with any ticket purchase.

The conference sold out last year, so be sure to secure your tickets early!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, March 24: Cville AI Explorers hosts a Demo Day: an opportunity to share personal projects you’re working on related to AI, demo tools you’re using, or bring up a topic for discussion with the group.

Tuesday, April 14: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will host Sharpening Your Rust Skills for Job Interviews, featuring Simeon Fitch, Principal Software Engineer at Datashapes AI, and Brad Campbell, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at UVA.

We’re thrilled to share that the second keynote speaker at the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference will be David Luebke, one of the founders of NVIDIA Research — an organization that’s been at the forefront of ML and AI research for two decades.

Dr. Luebke helped found NVIDIA Research in 2006 after eight years on the faculty of the University of Virginia. His principal research interests are computer graphics, generative neural networks, and virtual reality. Luebke is a Fellow of the IEEE and an inaugural inductee into the IEEE VR Academy. His other honors include the NVIDIA Distinguished Inventor award, the IEEE VR Technical Achievement Award, and Test of Time Awards at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia and the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics. He has co-authored a book, a major museum exhibit, and over two hundred papers, articles, chapters, and patents. Luebke currently serves as Vice President of Research at NVIDIA, where he runs a group of dozens of researchers focused on “New Experiences”.

We think Dr. Luebke and Vicki Boykis will deliver a fantastic pair of keynote talks, spanning from the deep GPU research that powers modern AI to the practical ML systems built on top of it.

Conference Registration Now Open

Conference registration for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now open! The conference will take place on April 17–18 in Charlottesville, Virginia — now just six weeks away. We’re offering Full Conference, Friday Only, and Saturday Only tickets at employer-paid, personal, and student price tiers.

Early Bird pricing is available until March 20.

Buy Your Tickets

A limited edition 2026 AMLC T-Shirt is available as an optional add-on with any ticket purchase.

The conference sold out last year, so be sure to secure your tickets early!

Sponsorship Opportunities

Sponsorship opportunities for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference are still available. We are an independent, community-organized conference, which means that support from corporate, institutional, and startup partners is essential to making the event possible. Whether you’re recruiting top talent, launching new tools and platforms, or building brand awareness in the AI space, the AMLC provides focused opportunities to connect with professionals and researchers who are actively building and deploying AI and machine learning systems.

Interested in learning more? Visit the Sponsorship page on the conference website and contact us at sponsorship@appliedml.us.

P.S. If you know colleagues or friends who might be interested in attending, please share this with them — we’d love to reach folks we might otherwise miss.