STARTER-AI Workshop Summer 2025, supported by NSF

May 21 - 23, 2025

Day 1: Opening & AI Research Highlights

The workshop opens with welcoming remarks and invited talks from external and UTRGV speakers. The afternoon features a showcase of AI research projects, including oral and poster presentations from students and faculty across UTRGV campuses.

Day 2: Hands-on AI Tutorials

Participants will take part in a series of hands-on sessions designed to introduce foundational tools and techniques in AI. Topics will include working with AI frameworks, building simple models, and exploring applications of language models.

Day 3: Research Infrastructure & Collaboration

The final day will feature an overview of UTRGV’s high-performance computing resources for AI research, followed by a panel discussion focused on interdisciplinary collaboration and future research opportunities

Click on the Register button below to begin your registration for our summer workshop.

 

Locations

• Edinburg: EIEAB 1.204
• Brownsville: BINAB (Room TBA)
• Online

Schedule

Day	Time	Event
Day 1: May 21
	9:00 AM	Check-in / Registration / Coffee
	9:30 AM	Welcome, Chair: Dr. Soumya Mohanty
	10:00 AM	UTRGV Speaker - TBA
	10:50 AM	Break
	11:00 AM	AI@UTRGV Showcase Oral Presentations, Chair: Dr. Sanjeev Kumar Part 1
	Noon	Lunch
	1:30 PM	AI@UTRGV Showcase Oral Presentations, Chair: Dr. Sanjeev Kumar Part 2
	2:30 PM	Distinguished Speaker - Dr. Robert Luo from UNM
	3:30 PM	Break
	3:45 - 4:30 PM	AI@UTRGV Research Poster Showcase Posters: Edinburg, Brownsville
Day 2: May 22	Theme: Beginner-Friendly, Hands-on AI Workshops with PyTorch in Google Colab
	9:00 AM	Check-in / Coffee
	9:30 AM	UTRGV Speaker - Dr. Francis Kofi Andoh-Baidoo
	10:30 AM	Intro to Google Colab + Setup Walkthrough of Colab, notebook runtime, and GPU setup
	10:50 AM	Break
	11:00 AM	Mini Workshop 1: Your First Neural Network Intro to tensors, gradients, and training a simple classifier
	Noon	Lunch
	1:30 PM	Mini Workshop 2: Sentiment Classification Train a PyTorch text classifier on short reviews (positive/negative)
	2:30 PM	Break
	2:45 - 3:45 PM	Mini Workshop 3: Fine-Tuning a Pretrained Language Model Use Hugging Face's DistilBERT to fine-tune on a small sentiment dataset
Day 3: May 23
	9:00 AM	Check-in / Coffee
	9:30 AM	Session: Getting Started on Cradle HPC (Part 1) Chair: TBA
	10:50 AM	Break
	11:00 AM	Session: Getting Started on Cradle HPC (Part 2) and Closing Remarks

 

Section Chairs and Invited Speakers

 

Invited Speakers

Bio:

Dr. Xin (Robert) Luo is a Distinguished Professor of Management Information Systems and an Endowed Dean's Professor of Research Excellence at the Robert O. Anderson School of Management of The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. He is ranked No.1 worldwide for publication in the AIS Senior Scholars List of Premier Journals for 2022–2024. Additionally, he has been listed in the Top 2 % Global Scientists list published by Stanford University and Elsevier. His research interests center around behavioral information systems security management, consumer privacy protection, e-commerce, innovative technologies for business strategic decision-making and development, and cross-cultural IT management. He has published in leading journals, including Information Systems Research, Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, and Information & Management. He currently serves as a senior editor for Decision Support Systems and Internet Research and as an associate editor for the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information & Management, Electronic Commerce Research, and Journal of Electronic Commerce Research. He sits on the Editorial Review Board of Information Systems Research. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Accounting and Information Management.

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