AIBridge 2026: Free AI Bootcamp for Non-CS Backgrounds

What's covered:

AIBridge bridges the gap between AI and other disciplines. AIBridge includes basic Python programming intro, concepts and workflow of machine learning (ML) models, how LLMs work and how to use it for research, and then put these skills into practice through hands-on labs, culminating in a final project presentation.

Who Should Sign Up

Graduate students, post-graduates, researchers, and UC system employees from non-CS backgrounds, or anyone interested in applying AI in their own field. No prior programming experience required.

Event Details

• Dates: August 3–7, 2026

• Time: 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Each day has two sessions and each session has one lecture followed by a lab. Attending all 5 days is highly recommended**

• Location: UC Davis (TLC-1214) 

• Format: In-person, hands-on labs and final project presentation

• What to bring: Participants must bring their own laptop, a gmail account, an account with ChatGPT or Claude (free account is okay). 

Syllabus

Monday

• Morning: AI/ML Mental Model + Colab + Python Survival Basics
• Afternoon: Python for Data + AI-Assisted Coding

Tuesday

• Morning: Supervised Learning I: Models
• Afternoon: Supervised Learning II: Evaluation and Data Quality

Wednesday

• Morning: The Model Zoo, Feature Structure, and Interpretability
• Afternoon: Overfitting, Leakage, and Unsupervised Structure

Thursday

• Morning: Deep Learning Basics: Pretraining and Fine-Tuning
• Afternoon: How LLMs Actually Work and Prompting

Friday

• Morning: LLMs as Research Instruments: Literature Review, Extraction, and RAG
• Afternoon: Closing Studio – Collaboration + Capstone