Competitive Build Initiative
Team up with other MSAIL members for AI competitions and long-term hackathons.
Projects & Initiatives
The projects and reading groups MSAIL runs, plus the ML Discussion archive.
Fall 2026
AI Research Project Team
Join a small team of student researchers working directly with a lab PI, contributing to a real research project from planning to completion. Projects run at least a semester, with two teams planned per term; this fall's tentative partner is the AIMS lab in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences. Python experience required, research experience not.
Model Mining: Alignment & Interp
Hands-on work with language models: extracting the behaviors you want, then using evals and mechanistic interpretability to check alignment and understand what is going on inside. Tentative topics include SFT, DPO, RL, causal steering, evals, and patching. Neural network experience required; LLM or math background helps.
AI in the News
Regular discussions of what AI is doing out in the world, from scientific papers to news headlines: the highlights and the hogwash.
One more project initiative is being scoped for this term. Join the Slack to hear about it first.
ML Discussion: Winter 2021 material
Material from the discussion group's Winter 2021 lesson series: slides, notebooks, and recordings, as the group posted them.
Classification with Logistic Regression
SlidesColab notebookLinear algebra primerPython basics (Kaggle)
Regression, Part 1 (Theory and Implementation)
Regression, Part 2 (Application)
Convolutional Neural Networks
Introduction and Basics of Deep Learning
Computer Vision
Natural Language Processing
Unsupervised Learning
Ethics
Lightning Round: Assorted AI Topics