Network and Hand
Start Date
End Date
Location
Boar's Head Resort - Pavillion
Sponsor
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, UVA Research, UVA Biocomplexity Institute, UVA Contagion Science, UVA Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
This workshop aims to bring together leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and its core universities — Duke University, Florida State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech. These researchers will present their new work and develop collaborations to advance the field of AI and to accelerate scientific discoveries.
Due to the need to balance the audience among the participating universities, this workshop is invitation only.
Day 1: Monday, September 14, 2026
| Time | Program | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| All Day | Badge Pickup (Pavilion Lobby) | |
| 7:30 AM – 8:30 AM | Breakfast (Pre-Function Space I) | |
| 8:30 AM – 9:00 AM | Opening Remarks Introduction and History of AI Core Remarks from Host - UVA | Thomas Potok (ORNL) Lori McMahon (UVA) |
| 9:00 AM – 9:45 AM | Keynote: TBD Session Chair: Madhav Marathe (UVA) | Georgia Tourassi (ORNL) |
| 9:45 AM – 10:15 AM | Coffee Break (Pavilion I+II) | |
| 10:15 AM – 11:45 AM | Talk Session Session Chair: TBD | |
| 10:15 AM – 10:45 AM | Mechanistic Interpretability of Protein Folding in AlphaFold 2 and ESM 2 | Aidong Zhang (UVA) |
| 10:45 AM – 11:15 AM | Topology-Driven Diffusion for Adverse Spatio-Temporal Event Surveillance | Yulia Gel (VT) |
| 11:15 AM – 11:45 AM | Talk 3 | Robert Patton (ORNL) |
| 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM | Lunch | |
| 12:45 PM – 1:45 PM | Panel Discussion Moderator: Ferdinando Fioretto (UVA) | |
| 1:45 PM – 2:30 PM | Keynote: AI Agents, Guardrails, and the Pace of Scientific Discovery Session Chair: Ramakrishnan Kannan (ORNL) | Ryan Wright (UVA) |
| 2:30 PM – 3:00 PM | Coffee Break (Pre-Function Space I) | |
| 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM | Talk Session Session Chair: TBD | |
| 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM | AI in High-Stakes Allocation: Judgment and Uncertainty | Sanmay Das (VT) |
| 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM | Navigating Scientific Knowledge: Toward Autonomous and Personalized AI Scientists | Tyler Derr (Vanderbilt) |
| 4:00 PM – 4:30 PM | Dual Inductive Biases in Brain Evolution | Nabil Imam (GT) |
| 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM | Genesis Mission Project Panel Session Chair: Forrest Hoffman (ORNL) | Prasanna Date (ORNL) Ramakrishnan Kannan (ORNL) Xiuwen Liu (FSU) Ferdinando Fioretto (UVA) Joshua Fu (UTK) |
| 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM | Banquet Dinner Hearth Room | Zach Mayes (ORNL) Xiuwen Liu (FSU) |
Day 2: Tuesday, September 15, 2026
| Time | Program | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| All Day | Badge Pickup (Pavilion Lobby) | |
| 7:30 AM – 8:40 AM | Breakfast (Pre-Function Space) | |
| 8:40 AM – 9:00 AM | Opening Remarks Summary of Day 1 & Plans for Day 2 An Invitation to Collaborate | Prasanna Date (ORNL) |
| 9:00 AM – 9:45 AM | Keynote: Power-Aware Computing in the Age of AI Session Chair: Prasanna Date (ORNL) | Kirk Cameron (VT) |
| 9:45 AM – 10:15 AM | Coffee Break (Pavilion I + II) | |
| 10:15 AM – 11:15 AM | Panel Discussion Moderator: Michael Parks (ORNL) | Hai Li (Duke) Guannan Zhang (ORNL) Stephen Turner (UVA) Dawei Zhou (VT) Raju Vatsavai (NCSU) |
| 11:15 AM – 1:15 PM | Poster Session & Lunch View poster details | |
| 1:15 PM – 3:00 PM | Talk Session Session Chair: TBD | |
| 1:15 PM – 1:45 PM | Deep Learning Guided Discovery of Synthetically Complex Peptides using Hierarchical Graph Networks | Camille Bilodeau (UVA) |
| 1:45 PM – 2:15 PM | Edge AI: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once | Yiran Chen (Duke) |
| 2:15 PM – 2:45 PM | Talk 10 | Ashish Gautam (ORNL) |
| 2:45 PM – 3:00 PM | Closing Remarks | Ramakrishnan Kannan (ORNL) Xiuwen Liu (FSU) |