Session-25

The twenty-fifth session of the LSST Discovery Alliance Data Science Fellowship Program focuses on Machine Learning for Astrophysics. The guest instructors for Session 25 are:

• Dr. Rob Morgan, Google
• Dr. Ioana Ciuca, Stanford University
• Dr. Aleksandra Ciprijanovic, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
• Dr. Yongseok Jo, SkAI Institute
• Dr. Lu Cheng, University of Illinois - Chicago

Lectures were also delivered by the DSFP leadership team:

• Dr. Adam Miller, CIERA | Northwestern

Schedule

Day 0 – The Beginning | Welcome to Session 25

Three orientation lectures are provided asynchronously, these are:

• A Brief Introduction to git/GitHub; A Miller
• Building Visualizations Via Principles of Design; A Miller
• Goals of the DSFP; A Miller

Sunday, June 7, 2026

• 01:00 PM – 01:30 PM o Registration & Introductions
• 01:30 PM – 02:00 PM o New Fellow Survey
• 02:00 PM – 02:30 PM o Code of Conduct Discussion
• 02:30 PM – 03:00 PM o BREAK
• 03:00 PM – 04:00 PM o Introduction to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and LSST; A Miller
• 04:00 PM – 05:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Probability and Data; A Miller
• 05:00 PM – ??:?? PM o Informal gathering with Cohort 8

Day 1 – Introduction to Machine Learning

Monday, June 8, 2026

• 08:30 AM – 09:00 AM o Registration
• 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM o Meet the new cohort
• 09:45 AM – 10:30 AM o Introduction to Machine Learning; A Miller
• 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM o BREAK
• 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Introduction to Scikit-Learn; A Miller
• 12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
• 01:30 PM – 02:30 PM o Introduction to Supervised Learning; R Morgan
• 02:30 PM – 04:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Introduction to Supervised Learning; R Morgan
• 04:00 PM – 04:30 PM o BREAK
• 04:30 PM – 06:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Building a Perceptron from Scratch; A Miller

Day 2 – Going Deeper | Neural Networks and Unsupervised Learning

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

• 09:00 AM – 10:00 AM o Going Deep: An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks; R Morgan
• 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM o BREAK
• 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Convolutional Neural Networks; R Morgan
• 12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
• 01:30 PM – 02:30 PM o Introduction to Unsupervised Learning; A Miller
• 02:30 PM – 03:30 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Introduction to Clustering; A Miller
• 03:30 PM – 04:00 PM o BREAK
• 04:00 PM – 05:00 PM o Recurrent Neural Networks and Transformers; I Ciuca
• 05:00 PM – 06:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] RNNs and Transformers; I Ciuca

Day 3 – Large Language Models

Wednesday, June 10, 2026

• 09:00 AM – 10:00 AM o Large Language Models; I Ciuca
• 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM o BREAK
• 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Large Language Models; I Ciuca
• 12:00 PM – ??:?? PM o AFTERNOON BREAK

Day 4 – Domain Adaptation and Representation Learning

Thursday, June 11, 2026

• 09:00 AM – 10:00 AM o Autoencoders: From PCA to the variational autoencoder; Y Jo
• 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM o BREAK
• 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] Autoencoders; Y Jo
• 12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
• 01:30 PM – 02:30 PM o Shift Happens: Building Robust AI Models with Domain Adaptation; A Ciprijanovic
• 02:30 PM – 04:00 PM o [Problems | Solutions] [Problems | Solutions] Domain Adaptation for ML; A Ciprijanovic
• 04:00 PM – 04:30 PM o BREAK
• 04:30 PM – 05:30 PM o Hack Day Pitch Session

Day 5 – Hack Day and AI Ethics

Friday, June 12, 2026

• 09:00 AM – 10:45 AM o Hack Session
• 10:45 AM – 11:15 AM o BREAK
• 11:15 AM – 12:00 PM o Hack Session
• 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM o Hack Sharebacks
• 12:30 PM – 02:00 PM o LUNCH
• 02:00 PM – 03:00 PM o Developing Ethical AI Models; L Cheng
• 03:00 PM – 04:00 PM o Problem: Case Studies; L Cheng
• 04:00 PM – 04:30 PM o Meeting Wrap Up