Thanks for joining us last Thursday for Charlottesville Data Science’s October event, Accuracy Isn’t Everything: Good Models are Lurking Everywhere featuring Evzenie Coupkova. The talk was a tour of recent research around Rashomon sets, dataset complexity, and what they mean for generalization and training time in neural networks. It featured some genuinely surprising results, such as that for certain well-known example datasets, a meaningful fraction of randomly generated neural networks can achieve a classification accuracy of over 90%!
If you’d like to review Evzenie’s slides, they’re available below. Stay tuned for updates about the next round of Charlottesville Data Science events in the coming months!
Show Us Your Agent Skills: Charlottesville Data Science Edition
Are you using AI agents in your data science and data engineering workflows? If so, how? What’s working, and what’s not? Consider showing off your agentic AI skills at a future Charlottesville Data Science event!
One of my favorite data science podcasts is Vanishing Gradients by Hugo Bowne-Anderson. This year, Hugo has been running an excellent series called Show Us Your (Agent) Skills, in which long-time Python, ML, AI, and data builders show how they’re actually using AI agents today. I’d love to replicate this idea within the Charlottesville Data Science community.
If you’re using AI agents to assist with data analysis, machine learning development, data engineering, or any other data-heavy workflow, and you’re game to give a demo for your fellow community members in a friendly environment, we’d love to hear from you. Please submit your idea through the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals!
More upcoming events around Charlottesville
Friday, October 16: The Interpretability for AI Safety and Science Research Interest Group hosts the final presentations from their AI interpretability hackathon at the UVA School of Data Science. The day will feature lightning talks from faculty members, a keynote from Greg Frank of MaceAI, and presentations from the competing teams.
Friday, October 16: Momin Malik, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic, speaks at the UVA School of Data Science on Anti-positivist data science, and applications to healthcare AI. The talk connects critical perspectives on quantification with practical questions about why healthcare AI classifiers fail to generalize, drift over time, or don't improve patient outcomes.
Tuesday, October 20: UVA's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab hosts a lunchtime talk at Bond House on Bologna’s Civic Digital Twin: Democratic Practices for Urban Simulation and Action. Speakers from the City of Bologna and Fondazione Bruno Kessler will discuss how the city is building urban simulation and modeling tools with democratic governance built in.
Friday, October 23: The UVA Darden School of Business hosts the inaugural Innovate@Darden event. Innovate@Darden will bring together students and practitioners for a day of dialogue around emerging trends, career pathways, and real-world applications of tech and AI across industries.
Wednesday, November 11: Charlottesville Data Science hosts our November event at Vault Virginia. Hunter Moore, co-founder of Hardshell, a Charlottesville-based AI startup, will present the talk How AI Systems Leak the Data They’re Built On. The presentation will explore how motivated users can easily induce AI systems to disclose sensitive information from their training data and retrieval corpus.
Friday, November 13: UVA Data Science hosts Datapalooza 2026, their signature annual event showcasing research and industry trends across Grounds and the greater data science community. This year’s Datapalooza will focus on what the future of work looks like when data, AI, and human expertise come together.
Tuesday, November 17: rvatech/ holds its annual rvatech/Women in Technology Conference at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond.
Wednesday–Thursday, November 18–19: UVA's Contemplative Sciences Center hosts AI Anxiety + Human Flourishing, a two-day public symposium on preparing young adults for a future with AI. Speakers include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, AI ethics researcher David Danks, and UVA President Scott Beardsley.
Tuesday, December 1: The Tom Tom Foundation hosts The Infrastructure of Tomorrow: Data Centers, AI, and Virginia’s Future, a conversation with State Senator Creigh Deeds and Delegate Katrina Callsen about whether Virginia can remain a leader in the digital infrastructure economy — while also protecting affordability, sustainability, and the long-term interests of its communities.
Friday, December 4: The LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business at UVA Darden hosts its fourth annual UVA Conference on Ethical AI in Business at The Forum Hotel, bringing together leaders from business, technology, and policy to talk about adopting AI responsibly. This year’s theme is “The AI Readiness Imperative: Preparing People & Organizations for Responsible AI.”