This workshop took place on April 8th and 9th, 2026, in Knoxville, TN.

For archival purposes, the original schedule and some of the resources are preserved below.

Workshop 1

April 8th and 9th, 2026

University of Tennessee, Knoxville Conference Center
600 Henley Street, Knoxville, TN 37902
Room 413 AB

There is no registration fee for individuals from academia or non-profit organizations.

Day 1: Fundementals, Context, and Hands-on Training

Focus: Establishing the baseline of AI/ML and understanding the regional health landscape.

Time Session Description
8:00AM Breakfast & Registration Welcome and check-in.
9:00AM Introductions & Level Setting Opening remarks and attendee introductions - Dr. Tabitha Samuel
9:15AM AI Tennessee Vision Overview of AI Tennessee - Dr. Vasileios Maroulas, Director of AI Tennessee
9:30AM The NAIRR Vision Overview of the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) goals and project scope - NSF
10:15AM Break  
10:30AM Training #1: AI Fundamentals Overview of architecture, parameters vs. hyperparameters, loss functions, and optimization. Overfitting and underfitting. - Dr. Amr Hilal
11:45AM Short Transition Break  
12:00PM Lunch Panel: Health Disparities Contextualizing TN: Discussion on Regional health challenges featuring:
  • Jennifer Ferris (MHS Director of Research, UTHSC College of Medicine, Knoxville)
  • Dr. Sima Namin (Health Disparities Research Specialist, UTHSC College of Medicine, Knoxville)
  • Sabrullah Deniz and Dr. Courtney Cronley (University of Tennessee, Smart Regional Healthcare Ecosystem (REACH) for East TN)
Moderated by Dr. Fatima T. Zahra, Assistant Professor of Evaluation, Statistics, & Research Methodology, UT
1:00PM Short Transition Break  
1:15PM Training #2: Foundation Models and Responsible AI Comparing CNN architectures vs. Transformer-based models and the benefits/ethics of pre-trained/foundation models. Discussing overfitting, distribution shifts, and why we use CUDA over CPU. Overview of NAIRR resource scaling and loss optimization monitoring - Dr. Jesse Roberts
2:15PM Afternoon Break  
2:45PM Training #3: Hands-on Modeling Technical Lab:
  • MNIST classification using a small CNN (Dr. Amr Hilal).
  • MNIST classification on CUDA with finetuning foundation approach (Dr. Jesse Roberts).
  • Classification on the CheXpert dataset CUDA (Dr. Hector Santos Villalobos).
4:15PM Precision Health Panel Innovations & Equity: Predictive analytics for chronic disease, AI-enabled rural health solutions, and equitable healthcare delivery, featuring:
  • Dr. Patricia Roberson, Director of The Healthy Families Lab and Research Team, College of Nursing, UTK
  • Dr. Tom Berg, Health, Strategy Director of Health Innovation Technology and Simulation Laboratory (HITS Lab), College of Nursing, UTK
Moderated by Dr. Courtney Cronley Professor of Social Work, UT
5:00PM After Hours Session Open Lab: Deep-dive Q&A for attendees to discuss specific project ideas with instructors.
6:00PM Informal Social Time and Networking At Barley’s, Knoxville:
 200 East Jackson Avenue, Knoxville, TN 37915

Day 2: Scaling Up and Future Steps

Focus: Transitioning from small-scale prototypes to large-scale infrastructure.

Time Session Description
8:00AM Breakfast Informal networking and arrival.
9:00AM Day 1 Recap & Open Discussion Summary of key takeaways and attendee Q&A.
9:45AM Break Refreshment break.
10:15AM Training #4: Scaling Up Responsible scaling. Moving from small subsets to the full 400GB+ CheXpert dataset using high-performance hardware. - Dr. Hector Santos Villalobos
12:00PM Working Lunch Final Q&A, resource sharing, and defining “Next Steps” for project implementation.
1:00PM Workshop Conclusion End of session.