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.

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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!

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(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.

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 seven 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!

Questions? Simply hit reply to this message.

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.

​We’re looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow for Powering the Transition: Data Science for Smarter Energy! In this double-feature, Manaar Salama, a Data Operations Analyst at RECmint, will explore how machine learning is improving solar forecasting — helping maintain grid stability and ensuring the economic viability of renewable energy. Next, Charlie Henderson, founder and CEO of Stacker Group, will dive into real-time decisioning architecture, showing how closed-loop systems can sense, decide, and act at millisecond speed. Together, these talks illuminate how data science is reshaping energy systems from the rooftop to the grid.

More Details and RSVP

We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the Downtown Mall. Thanks again to the team at Vault for hosting us!

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, March 5: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will hold the third online event in their series on Tock, an open-source operating system written in Rust. This session will focus on how capsules and lower-level hardware drivers are implemented in Rust and how user-space apps interact with them.

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.

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 will open soon, and sponsorship opportunities are also available.

There’s less than a week left to propose talks and tutorials for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference! The Call for Proposals closes at the end of the day on Sunday, February 22. We’re seeking proposals for 30-minute talks and 90-minute tutorials covering topics in data science, AI, machine learning, scientific computing, and related fields.

A few tips as the CFP enters the home stretch:

• LLMs and AI agents are the hottest of hot topics right now, and will feature prominently at the conference, but not every proposal needs to be about AI. We are aiming to create a balanced conference program that highlights a broad array of ML methods and applications, tools, engineering, and infrastructure, classical modeling approaches, organizational and societal concerns, and more.

• We usually receive many fewer proposals for tutorials than we do for talks. If you want to boost your chances of speaking at the conference, propose a tutorial!

Accepted speakers receive a free ticket for the entire event.

For more details and to submit a proposal, please review the Call for Proposals page on the Applied Machine Learning Conference website:

View the Call for Proposals

One more thing — if you know colleagues or friends who might be interested in speaking, please share this with them! We’d love to reach folks we might otherwise miss.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, February 24: Charlottesville Data Science will host Powering the Transition: Data Science for Smarter Energy, a double-feature on the data science driving humanity’s transition to smarter, cleaner energy. Manaar Salama, a Data Operations Analyst at RECmint, and Charlie Henderson, founder and CEO of Stacker Group, will illuminate how data science is reshaping energy systems from the rooftop to the grid.

Thursday, March 5: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will hold the third online event in their series on Tock, an open-source operating system written in Rust. This session will focus on how capsules and lower-level hardware drivers are implemented in Rust and how user-space apps interact with them.

​Please join Charlottesville Data Science on the evening of Tuesday, February 24 for a double-feature on the data science powering humanity’s transition to smarter, cleaner energy. Manaar Salama, a Data Operations Analyst at RECmint, will explore how machine learning is improving solar forecasting — helping maintain grid stability and ensuring the economic viability of renewable energy. Next, Charlie Henderson, founder and CEO of Stacker Group, will dive into real-time decisioning architecture, showing how closed-loop systems can sense, decide, and act at millisecond speed. Together, these talks illuminate how data science is reshaping energy systems from the rooftop to the grid.

More Details and RSVP

We’ll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the Downtown Mall. Thanks again to the team at Vault for hosting us!

​Talk 1: Solar Forecasting: Driving the Shift from Gas to Grid

​The transition to a less gas-driven, more-electrified future is a critical step in addressing climate change, but it relies heavily on our ability to predict the unpredictable. As solar energy becomes a key variable of this shift, the vast amounts of data generated by residential systems present a unique opportunity. Accurate forecasting is becoming a necessity for maintaining grid stability and ensuring the economic viability of renewable energy for homeowners.

​In this talk, Manaar Salama will explore the intersection of data science and solar energy, focusing on the growing landscape of the Mid-Atlantic. She will discuss the challenges of modeling energy production data and how machine learning is being used to solve problems — such as ensuring accurate estimations so that homeowners’ SREC (Solar Renewable Energy Certificate) payments are processed without delay. By the end of this presentation, attendees will understand the key role of predictive modeling in the green energy transition and how ML can remove financial friction for everyday users.

​This talk is relevant for data analysts, scientists, or professionals in the energy industry, as well as anyone interested in how data science can drive real progress toward sustainability.

​Talk 2: Next Best Action: Architecting the Future of Model-driven, Real-time Decisioning

​The energy sector requires real-time decision-making. “NBA” (Next Best Action) is an architectural pattern that brings more data into the context of every decision, while enabling continuous learning. Charlie Henderson, founder and CEO of Stacker Group, will break down how real-time decisioning combines millisecond-speed execution, continuous data integration, and live decision context to move beyond batch-based decisioning. You’ll see how closed-loop systems that sense, decide, act, and learn make it possible to deliver fast, in-app AI decisions, with fewer trade-offs.

​About the Speakers

​Manaar Salama is a Data Operations Analyst at RECmint, a Charlottesville-based SREC aggregator. She specializes in analyzing residential energy production trends and optimizing the data pipelines that connect homeowners to renewable energy incentives. A graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in Data Science, Manaar is dedicated to advancing data-driven solutions that support the transition to a sustainable future.

​Charlie Henderson is the founder and CEO of Stacker Group and Stacker AI Lab, where he helps Fortune 1000 enterprises overcome technical barriers to fully leveraging their data and ML models. His work focuses on architecting high-performance parallel processing solutions, transforming legacy systems into modern reactive architectures, and enabling real-time decision-making at scale. Stacker Group serves leading enterprises in finance and clean energy.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, February 10: Cville AI Explorers hosts their February event, Transformers Explained. Nish Tahir, a Principal Applied AI Research Engineer at Telus Digital, will explore the underlying machine learning architecture that powers most modern AI systems.

Sunday, February 22: The Call for Proposals for the Applied Machine Learning Conference closes at 11:59pm. We are seeking proposals for 30-minute talks and 90-minute tutorials that share knowledge, insights, and practical experience in data science, AI, machine learning, and related fields. For more details and to submit a proposal, please see the Call for Proposals page on the conference website.

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. The Call for Proposals is now open, and ticket sales will begin soon. Sponsorship opportunities are also available.

P.S. Know friends or colleagues who might enjoy our Charlottesville Data Science events? Forward this message to them! You’d be surprised how many people study or work in data science, AI, or machine learning in the Charlottesville area and aren’t aware that there’s a robust community and monthly event series in town.

…the renowned machine learning engineer Vicki Boykis!

Vicki is a founding ML engineer at Malachyte, an AI platform for e-commerce that adapts to consumer behavior in real time. Previously, she built LLM-evaluation tooling at Mozilla.ai and search/recommendation systems at Duo and Tumblr. She writes about scalable ML in production, information retrieval, and human-centric AI. Vicki was also the creator and organizer of NormConf, a conference all about practical, everyday machine learning that practitioners actually use. She has delivered previous keynote talks at PyData Amsterdam and PyCon Italia. In her "free time", she writes short stories, learns to DJ by making terrible mixes and loves Nutella.

The AMLC Program Committee is delighted to have Vicki on board at the conference!

Call for Proposals Now Open

The Call for Proposals is currently open! We’re seeking proposals for 30-minute talks and 90-minute tutorials covering topics in data science, AI, machine learning, scientific computing, and related fields. Whether this is your first conference talk or your fiftieth, we’re looking for speakers from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels.

View the Call for Proposals

The deadline to submit proposals is Sunday, February 22 at 11:59pm AoE.

Suggested topic areas include (but aren’t limited to!) case studies of applied ML; large language models and agentic AI; machine learning methods; tools, engineering, and infrastructure; data analysis and visualization; classical modeling approaches; and organizational/societal concerns. We especially welcome proposals featuring open-source tools and frameworks.

Accepted speakers receive a free ticket for the entire event.

For more details and to submit a proposal, please review the Call for Proposals page on the Applied Machine Learning Conference website.

Ticket Sales Opening Soon

Conference registration for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference will begin soon. We expect the conference to sell out, so be sure to secure your tickets early!

You can enter your email address on the Conference Registration page to make sure you’re among the first to know when ticket sales go live.

Go to the Conference Registration Page

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 and institutional sponsors 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.

Is your organization interested in partnering with the Applied Machine Learning Conference? Visit the Sponsorship page on the conference website and contact us at sponsorship@appliedml.us to learn more!

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

The Call for Proposals for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference is now open! We’re seeking proposals for 30-minute talks and 90-minute tutorials covering topics in data science, AI, machine learning, scientific computing, and related fields. Whether this is your first conference talk or your fiftieth, we’re looking for speakers from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels.

• Conference dates: April 17–18, 2026

• Location: Charlottesville, Virginia

• Submission deadline: Sunday, February 22, 11:59pm AoE

Suggested topic areas include applied ML, large language models and agentic AI, machine learning methods, tools and infrastructure, data analysis and visualization, classical modeling approaches, and organizational/societal concerns. We especially welcome proposals featuring open-source tools and frameworks.

Accepted speakers receive a free ticket for the entire event.

For more details and to submit a proposal, please review the Call for Proposals page on the Applied Machine Learning Conference website:

View the Call for Proposals

We look forward to reviewing your proposals!

— The AMLC Program Committee

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

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow for Seeing in the Dark: Unlocking AI in Next-Gen Radar Applications, featuring Charlottesville’s own May Casterline of NVIDIA! May recently delivered this talk at NVIDIA’s major GTC conference in Washington, DC, and now she’s bringing it closer to home for the Charlottesville Data Science community. May will introduce NVIDIA NVRadar, a GPU-native software framework that unites digital signal processing and AI into a single, accessible workflow, opening the door for both engineers and AI practitioners to create smarter, more responsive radar systems.

We’ll be gathering in person at the TELUS Digital campus (previously known as WillowTree) at Woolen Mills. Please check the event page on Luma for directions on how to access the building. Hope to see you there!

More Details and RSVP

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Tuesday, January 27: Cville AI Explorers hosts their January event, Transformers Explained. Nish Tahir, a Principal Applied AI Research Engineer at Telus Digital, will explore the underlying machine learning architecture that powers most modern AI systems.

Thursday, January 29: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will hold the second online event in their series on Tock, an open-source, Rust-based operating system used to run multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on embedded platforms, from security processors to automotive systems.

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. The Call for Proposals and ticket sales will both open soon, and sponsorship opportunities are also available.

The Charlottesville Data Science organizing team is pleased to announce the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference. An annual event with roots running back to 2017, the Applied Machine Learning Conference is a two-day, in-person event that brings hundreds of data scientists, AI engineers, computational researchers, and other technical leaders from across the country to Charlottesville to share knowledge, learn from each other, and advance the fields of applied machine learning, AI, and scientific computing.

Check out the Applied Machine Learning Conference website for more information, or read on for key details below.

View the AMLC Website

Conference Dates

The 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference will take place on April 17-18, 2026.

Conference Schedule and Venues

• The first day of the conference, Friday, April 17, will be held at the Violet Crown Cinema on the Downtown Mall and will consist of keynote presentations, 40-minute conference talks, networking opportunities, and sponsor exhibitions.

• The second day, Saturday, April 18, will be held at the UVA School of Data Science and will consist of practical, 90-minute tutorials diving deeper into the latest tools and techniques used by modern data science and AI professionals.

Ticket Sales

Registration for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference will begin soon. We expect the conference to sell out, so be sure to secure your tickets early!

To receive a notification when ticket sales begin, sign up on the Conference Registration page on the AMLC website.

View the Conference Registration Page

Call for Proposals

The Call for Proposals for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference will open soon. We are seeking proposals for 40-minute talks and 90-minute tutorials that share knowledge, insights, and practical experience in data science, AI, machine learning, and related fields. Speakers will receive a free ticket for the entire event.

To receive a notification when the Call for Proposals opens, sign up on the Call for Proposals page on the AMLC website.

View the Call for Proposals Page

Sponsorship Opportunities

We are actively seeking sponsorship partners for the 2026 Applied Machine Learning Conference. We are an independent, community-organized conference, which means that sponsors are essential to making the event possible.

Is your organization interested in partnering with the Applied Machine Learning Conference? Visit the Sponsorship page on the conference website and contact us at sponsorship@appliedml.us to learn more!

We are delighted to bring a marquee data science, AI, and machine learning event back to Charlottesville. You’ll hear much more about the Applied Machine Learning Conference in the coming months. If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the comments below!

Please join Charlottesville Data Science on the evening of Thursday, January 22 for the talk Seeing in the Dark: Unlocking AI in Next-Gen Radar, featuring Charlottesville’s own May Casterline of NVIDIA! May recently delivered this talk at NVIDIA’s major GTC conference in Washington, DC.

​We'll be gathering in person at the TELUS Digital campus (previously known as WillowTree) at Woolen Mills.

More Details and RSVP

​About the talk

​Radar has long enabled us to “see” what the human eye cannot—through darkness, fog, and across great distances. In areas like remote sensing and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), it reveals the invisible, powering applications from environmental monitoring to autonomous systems. Yet radar development has traditionally been split between two worlds: the rigor of digital signal processing (DSP) and the adaptability of AI.

This talk introduces NVIDIA NVRadar, a GPU-native software framework that unites DSP and AI into a single, accessible workflow. By combining simulation, testing, model training, and real-time deployment, it opens the door for both engineers and AI practitioners to create smarter, more responsive radar systems. Attendees will see how next-generation tools are transforming radar into an intelligent platform for “seeing in the dark.”

​About the speaker

​Dr. May Casterline is a director of solutions architecture at NVIDIA, focusing on deep learning and AI applications. She holds a Ph.D. and B.S. in imaging science from Rochester Institute of Technology, with a focus on remote sensing. In industry, she has acted as a product owner, technical lead, lead developer, and image scientist on both research initiatives and development projects.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, January 8: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup is holding an online Meet, Swap, and Learn event. Ring in the new year with a virtual show-and-tell of your favorite Rust books, blogs, videos, and conferences from 2025!

Tuesday, January 27: Cville AI Explorers hosts their January event, Transformers Explained. Nish Tahir, a Principal Applied AI Research Engineer at Telus Digital, will explore the underlying machine learning architecture that powers most modern AI systems.

Thursday, January 29: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup will hold the second online event in their series on Tock, an open-source, Rust-based operating system used to run multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on embedded platforms, from security processors to automotive systems.

This Friday, December 12, our friends at the Center for Open Science are hosting a colloquium on the integrity of open research in an era of uncertainty. The event, called At a Crossroads: Charting a Path for Research Integrity, will examine this year’s significant shift in U.S. federal science policy and its implications for the trustworthiness of science and scholarship. The program will feature speakers from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Center for Open Data Enterprise, among others, as well as multiple former officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The event is free, but seating is limited, and advance registration is required.

More Details and Reserve Your Spot

The colloquium will begin at 1:30pm at the CODE Building on the Downtown Mall. An informal reception will follow.

More upcoming events around Charlottesville

Thursday, January 8: The Charlottesville Rust Meetup is holding an online Meet, Swap, and Learn event. Ring in the new year with a virtual show-and-tell of your favorite Rust books, blogs, videos, and conferences from 2025!

Thursday, January 22: Join Charlottesville Data Science for our January event, Seeing in the Dark: Unlocking AI in Next-Gen Radar Applications. In this talk, May Casterline, a director of Solutions Architecture at NVIDIA, will introduce NVRadar — a GPU-native software framework that unites digital signal processing and AI into a single, accessible workflow. May recently gave this talk at NVIDIA’s major GTC conference, and now she’s bringing it home for the Charlottesville Data Science community! We’ll be gathering in person at TELUS Digital (formerly WillowTree).