This workshop was held as part of Vanderbilt’s AISS26 on August 13th and 14th, 2026.

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

Workshop 2

August 13th and 14th, 2026

Stevenson Center Complex 4
Stevenson Center Lane
Nashville, TN, 37240

Day 1

Time Session Description
1:00PM Opening & Welcome Anthony Skjellum, PhD - Tennessee Technological University (askjellum@tntech.edu)
1:15PM Keynote - AI for Health Disparity Melinda Aldrich, PhD, MPH - Vanderbilt University Medical Center (melinda.aldrich@vanderbilt.edu)
2:00PM Coffee Break  
2:30PM - 4:45PM Data Workshop “What data do we have, and what could we do with it on NAIRR?” - Four talks, 30 min each (incl. Q&A)
Time Speaker Topic
2:30PM Yuankai Huo, PhD (Vanderbilt University) "Evaluating Cell AI Foundation Models in Kidney Pathology"
3:00PM Junyu Chen, PhD (Johns Hopkins Uniervsity) "Learn2Reg: Advancing Medical Image Registration through Open Data and Open Challenges"
3:30PM Short break
3:45PM Nicholas Jackson (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) "Toward reliable synthetic data: challenges of task-specificity and multimodality in biomedical research"
4:15PM Zhuohui Liang (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) "Generating synthetic multi-national longitudinal cohorts for clinically grounded HIV research"
5:00PM Reception Food, drinks, networking. Carries the energy into Day 2.

Day 2

Time Session Description
9:00AM What is NAIRR - and what it’s NOT for Bennett Landman (Vanderbilt). Honest framing of when national-scale resources are the right tool vs. overkill.
9:30AM The NAIRR Vision (via Zoom/Teams) Wen-Wen Tung, NAIRR Program Officer (NSF) on the vision, roadmap, and how to get and keep access.
10:00AM Demo 1 - Registration Bake-Off (hands-on) Benchmark deformable medical image registration methods on the full public LUMIR/OpenBHB brain-MRI set at challenge scale, assembling one live leaderboard.

With Junyu Chen & Lianrui Zuo.
12:00PM Lunch  
1:00PM Demo 2 - Train Your Own Model (hands-on) Train a registration model on Delta, then score it against the Demo 1 leaderboard. Single GPU for all; instructor runs full multi-GPU job live.
3:00PM Closing Remarks & Next Steps Resources, how to apply for allocations, and THRIVE follow-on (Memphis, TBA). Adjourn by 4:00PM.