About ML+X

ML+X brings together researchers, students, and professionals across disciplines who are interested in machine learning and AI. Based at UW-Madison, our community connects people working on everything from scientific research to practical applications, creating opportunities to share ideas, learn new methods, and collaborate across fields.

Whether you’re just getting started with ML/AI or have years of experience, you’re welcome to join. Through informal meetups, workshops, and collaborative projects like the Machine Learning Marathon, we help members learn from one another and put ML/AI to work on interesting problems. More at ML+X’s community page.

Join

Everyone interested in machine learning methods is welcome! Join the Google group to be notified of upcoming events, and join the Slack channel (#ml-community) to stay connected with the community. Please email us if you have any trouble joining the Google group (you must be signed in to a Google account). New members are encouraged to introduce themselves via Slack.

ML+Coffee

ML+Coffee is ML+X’s monthly two-hour meetup on applied ML/AI. Each session has one or two short presentations or demos from members on what they are building; recent ones covered LoRA fine-tuning and agentic AI for biological modeling, protein engineering with MaveDB, forecasting climate-related conflict, and sparse autoencoders for model interpretability. The rest of the time is open discussion: bring a dataset and ask how ML/AI could apply to it, get unstuck on a project, or compare notes on tools and workflows. Researchers and students with little or no ML/AI background are welcome, and experienced practitioners are asked to bring advice as much as questions. Coffee and tea provided.

When: monthly on a Wednesday, 9–11 AM. The Google group sends the calendar invite.
Where: Room 1145, Discovery Building, first floor, west side, near the exit toward University Avenue.
To present or get help with a project: fill in the sign-up form sent to the Google group a few days before each session.

Next ML+Coffee: not yet scheduled. Join the Google group to get the calendar invite.

Date	Past sessions
2026-11-11	LoRA Finetuning & Agentic AI for Biological Modeling
2026-10-07	Model Interpretability with Sparse Autoencoders; Detecting Insect Migration in Weather Data
2026-09-09	Qwen Powered Robotics & Surgical Video to Op Notes
2026-05-06	Optical Character Recognition & Conversational Surveys
2026-04-08	Entity Matching
2026-03-11	Coding Agents and More
2026-02-18	GB10/DGX-Spark, “OpenScholar” RAG, and more
2025-11-05	Protein Engineering with MaveDB
2025-10-08	Forecasting Climate Related Conflict
2025-09-10	How Can I Apply ML/AI To My Data?
2025-05-07	Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) & SQLDeps

Upcoming ML+X events are also listed under the ML+X tag on the UW events calendar.

ML Marathon

The Machine Learning Marathon is ML+X’s semester-long hackathon, September to December each year. Teams of three to six pick a challenge from a slate of research problems, meet for weekly in-person sprint sessions, usually Wednesday evenings, and work asynchronously in between, with advisors for when a team is stuck. Challenges span skill levels and fields; recent ones have included coding agents on small open-weight models, transcribing 19th-century manuscripts with vision-language models, auditing a tampered neural network, predicting imagery from EEG, estimating deer populations from trail cameras, and RAG over the AI-and-sustainability literature.

Who: anyone with a UW-Madison NetID, undergraduates through faculty and staff. Participants should know Python basics, machine learning fundamentals, and enough GitHub to collaborate; the Intro to Python and Intro to Machine Learning workshops cover the first two.
When to apply: applications open in late summer, with a first review round in August and rolling admission until seats fill. The Marathon site has the current challenges, schedule, rules and FAQ.
Past and current challenges are written up under Projects on this site.
Get involved: the Marathon recruits advisors, presenters and volunteers each year through its interest form.

Other ML+X activities

Workshops: developed and taught with UW-Madison’s Carpentries community, from Python and machine learning basics to cloud ML, fine-tuning and trustworthy AI. A new workshop is typically developed each year when hackathon projects and research across campus call for new topics and skills.
Talks: ML+X no longer runs a regular talk series, but if you would like to present your ML/AI work to a broad campus audience, email endemann@wisc.edu. Recordings of past talks are on this site.
EVIL reading group: the Ethics, Values, Information and Law reading group, roughly every three weeks on Fridays, online, with the iSchool.
Your event: a paper to discuss, a demo to give, a lunch social or a mini workshop. ML+X can help facilitate, advertise or host it. Email endemann@wisc.edu.

Nexus

This site is the community’s resource hub: workshops, guides, notebooks, models, datasets, compute options and stories from practitioners, contributed by members. See How to contribute to add a resource.

Leadership

ML+X’s community page lists the current leadership team. The team plans events and resources and welcomes new members, students included, with no minimum experience. To join, email endemann@wisc.edu with a short note on your interest in machine learning and AI or in communities of practice.