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UID:63bf4ea7-4458-4dec-853b-9a1a17004719@nexttoyou
DTSTAMP:20261105T154442Z
DTSTART:20261106T140000Z
DTEND:20261106T220000Z
SUMMARY:Short Course: An Overview of LLMs for Statisticians: Foundations\,
  Reasoning and Agentic AI
LOCATION:Duques Hall 251 (morning) and Phillips Hall 411 (afternoon)\, 801
  22nd St NW / 2201 G St NW\, Washington\, DC 20052
DESCRIPTION:The GW Department of Statistics presents\, An Overview of LLMs
  for Statisticians: Foundations\, Reasoning\, and Agentic AI\, a short co
 urse taught by Linjun Zhang\, associate professor in the Department of St
 atistics and an affiliated faculty member in computer science at Rutgers 
 University\n\nLocation:\nPlease note that the location has been updated.\
 n\nMorning Session: Duques Hall\, Room 251Afternoon Session: Phillips Hal
 l\, Room 411\n\nDate/Time:\nNovember 6\, 2026\n9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.\nLunch
  break: 12:00–1:30 p.m.\n\nDescription:\nThis short course provides an ov
 erview of the foundations and frontiers of modern large language models (
 LLMs)\, with an emphasis on topics relevant to statisticians and data sci
 entists. We will begin with the basic principles underlying embeddings\, 
 transformers\, and the LLM training pipeline\, including pretraining\, pa
 rameter-efficient fine-tuning\, and reinforcement learning from human fee
 dback. Building on these foundations\, we will discuss recent development
 s in reasoning models and agentic AI\, including context engineering\, ha
 rness engineering\, and the design of AI agents for complex tasks. We wil
 l also discuss key issues in AI safety\, reliability\, and evaluation. Th
 e short course will combine conceptual foundations with practical example
 s and hands-on activities\, with the goal of helping participants underst
 and\, use\, and critically evaluate modern AI systems.\n\nShort Bio:\nLin
 jun Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics and a
 n affiliated facu\n\nhttp://next-to-u.app/events/63bf4ea7-4458-4dec-853b-
 9a1a17004719
URL:http://next-to-u.app/events/63bf4ea7-4458-4dec-853b-9a1a17004719
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