Interdisciplinary AI Journal Club | LSU College of Science

Phys&Astro + Math + Computer Science

Quick links

Welcome to the LSU AI Club, a vibrant interdisciplinary community where the Physics and Astronomy Department, the Department of Mathematics, and the Computer Science Department come together to explore the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence in scientific data analysis. This journal club is dedicated to fostering collaboration, innovation, and learning.

Whether you are a seasoned researcher or new to the field, AI Club provides a platform to explore the latest AI trends, discuss groundbreaking papers, and expand your knowledge through engaging discussions and presentations. Join us to learn, share, and contribute to the dynamic world of AI in science.

AI-Club Weekly Meetings Time & Location

All appointments for Fall semester 2026 will be on Fridays at 10:30AM -- 12:00PM.

Our Lady of the Lake Health Interdisciplinary Science Building, Room 453 (4th floor).

Access the live streaming on Zoom (zoom link, Meeting ID: 965 9718 3191)

News! We are organizing ASPIRE, a 2-day workshop on AI!

Are you interested? Please fill in this Interest Form

AI-Club Weekly Meetings Calendar

Click the semester you’d like to expand to view the expected schedule.

Fall 2026

When	Activities	Post Meting Notes and Agenda
Aug 28	Welcome and Introduction	Report from last semester working groups
Sep 4 -- Dec 11	Groups work	Hands-on collaborative ML data Projects

Spring 2026

When	Activities	Post Meeting Notes and Agenda
Jan 23	Intro to PDEs and ML	Shawn introduced 3 main PDE-related problems that are currently being approached with machine learning: solving complex PDE parameters, fitting data given known PDEs plus additional uknown function, and interpolating parametric PDEs.
Jan 30	Discussion project 1: Astrophysics	Presentation and discussion of the first proposed project: Solving PDE of particle transport in gamma-ray burst jets. New: Discussed material will be shared in this box (to get access reach out to Dr. M. Missiaggia)
Feb 6	Discussion project 2: Nuclear Physics	presentation and discussion of the second proposed project: Solving PDE for multi-nuceons systems. New: Discussed material will be shared in this box
Feb 13	Discussion project 3: Biological Radiation Physics	Presentation and discussion of the third proposed project: Solving PDEs with Neural Operators Learning New: Discussed material will be shared in this box
Feb 20	Working groups breakout sessions	Hands-on projects
Feb 27	Working groups breakout sessions	Hands-on projects
Mar--Apr	Working groups breakout sessions	Hands-on projects
May 1	Wrap-up	Last day of Hands-on projects: We decided to continue with th collaborative working sessions in Fall. Some groups will meet over the summer as well.

Fall 2025

When	Activities	Post Meeting Notes and Agenda
Sep 11	Kick off / Intro Selection of a Data Challenge / Project Set-up of GitHub repo
Sep 25	Read the data and inspect the dataset discuss the initial NN design
Oct 9	Discussion about CNNs: Convolutions for Image CNNs (LeNet) DEEP DOUBLE DESCENT (Nakkiran et al) Examples of Modern CNNs
Oct 23	Collaborative Session Implemented the DataLoader class
Nov 6	Collaborative Session Implemented the LeNet architecture Defined the accuracy monitor (to monitor loss and accuracy through the epochs)
Nov 20	Collaborative Session Final results reported in the repo's README Discussed next semester's activity

Spring 2025

When	Activities	Discussion topics
Jan 23	Kick off JC + Invited seminar	Icebreaker / (tentative: Variational Autoencoders)
Feb 6	Regular AI-JC	WAN Discretization of PDEs: Best Approximation, Stabilization, and Essential Boundary Conditions Storm surge modeling in the AI era: Using LSTM-based machine learning for enhancing forecasting accuracy Graph construction on complex spatiotemporal data for enhancing graph neural network-based approaches
Feb 20	Regular AI-JC / Invited seminar	Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces
Mar 6	Invited seminar	Physics-informed NN (by Noah Thompson, LSU)
Mar 20	Regular AI-JC / Invited seminar	Eﬃciently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces Resurrecting Recurrent Neural Networks for Long Sequences CPM-based Hierarchical Text Classification
Apr 3	Invited seminar	Machine Learning for Optical Communications and Technology (by Manon Bart Tulane University)
Apr 17	Invited seminar	Seminar on Topological Deep Learning
May 1	Regular AI-JC /	Learning from labeled and unlabeled data with label propagation. Scikit-Learn package

Fall 2024

When	Activities	Discussed Topics
September 11	Canceled (Hurricane)	--
September 25	Kick off JC	Icebreaker topics: why do we care about AI
October 9	Invited Seminar	Presentation by James Ghawaly: An overview of ML techniques for data analysis
October 23	Regular AI-JC	Characterization of the Autoencoder Radiation Anomaly Detection (ARAD) model Prompt GRB recognition through waterfalls and deep learning Data Incubation-synthesizing missing data for handwriting recognition
November 6	Regular AI-JC	Topological Autoencoders A Deep Learning Approach for Active Anomaly Detection of Extragalactic Transients
November 20	Invited Seminars and Discussion	Presentation by Dr. Wang – Dep of Math LSU: KL Divergence insights Presentation by Dr. Cibrario – University of Torino (Italy): A regression problem: dealing with angles Statistical method scDEED for detecting dubious 2D single-cell embeddings and optimizing t-SNE and UMAP hyperparameters

Contact the mailing list

We are in the process of changing the mailing list. Stay tuned for instructions.

The AI-JC Organizing Team

Michela Negro -- Physics & Astronomy

Marta Missiaggia -- Physics & Astronomy

Xiaoliang Wan -- Mathematics

Shawn Walker -- Mathematics

Francesco Cordoni -- Civil and Environmental Engineering

James Ghawaly -- Computer Science

Maganizo Kapita – Mathematics (Grad Student)

Phong Dang -- Physics & Astronomy (Grad Student)