9th Advanced Course on Data Science & Machine Learning

About

The 9th Advanced Course on Data Science & Machine Learning – ACDL 2026 is a full-immersion five-day Course at the Riva del Sole Resort & SPA (Castiglione della Pescaia – Grosseto – Tuscany, Italy) on cutting-edge advances in Deep Learning, Data Science, LLMs, Foundation Models, and Generative AI with lectures delivered by world-renowned experts. The Course provides a stimulating environment for PhD students, Post-Docs, junior academics (only up to assistant professors), early career researchers, and industry leaders (and highly motivated, promising and brilliant Master students / BSc students). Participants will also have the chance to present their results with talks, and to interact with their colleagues, in a convivial, professional and productive environment.

* Lucas Beyer, Meta, Zürich, Switzerland
3 Lectures on "Transformers & Vision Transformers"

* Sven Giesselbach, T Systems International & Fraunhofer Institute - IAIS, Germany
3 Lectures on “Agentic AI”

* Anirudh Goyal, Google DeepMind & Mila, Université de Montréal, Canada
3 Lectures on “Metacognition as a Control Plane for Reasoning”

* Arthur Gretton, UCL & Google DeepMind, UK
2 Lectures on "Causal Effect Estimation with Context and Confounders”

* Mario Guarracino, University of Cassino and Souther Lazio, Italy
Lectures TBA

* Katja Hofmann, Microsoft, UK
3 Lectures on “World Models”

* Arnulf Jentzen, University of Münster, Germany
Lecture 1/3 “Mathematical Introduction to Stochastic Gradient Descent Optimization”
Lecture 2/3 “Error Analyses for Adam and further Accelerated and Adaptive Optimizers”
Lecture 3/3 “Deep Learning for High-Dimensional Partial Differential Equations”

* Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind, UK
Lectures TBA

* Panos Pardalos, University of Florida, USA
Lectures TBA

* Michal Valko, Stealth Startup, INRIA, MVA at ENS Paris-Saclay, France
Lecture 1/3 “Lightspeed RL Fine Tuning for LLMs”
Lecture 2/3 “Online and Offline RL Considerations for LLMs “
Lecture 3/3 “New Advances on the Theory of Language Generation and Hallucination”

* Jason Weston, META, USA
Lecture 1/3 “Self-Improving Language Models”
Lecture 2/3 “Self-Improving Agents”
Lecture 3/3 “The Future of Self-Improvement & the Promise of Co-Improving AI”

More Lecturers TBA

📑 LECTURES:
🔗 https://acdl2026.icas.events/lectures/

📚 PAST LECTURERS:
🔗 https://acdl2026.icas.events/past-lecturers/

Language: English

Course leader

Professor Giuseppe Nicosia and Professor Panos Pardalos

Target group

PhD students, PostDocs, Industry Practitioners and Junior Academics (only up to assistant professors) will be typical profiles of the ACDL attendants. The Course will involve a total of 36–40 hours of lectures, according to the academic system the final achievement will be equivalent to 8 ECTS points for the PhD Students (and some strongly motivated Master Student – BSc Student) attending the Course

Course aim

To participate in the ACDL 2026, all attendants must:

(1/2) register for the course (by May 23, 2026) and
(2/2) book accommodation at the course venue, “Riva del Sole Resort & SPA” (by May 23, 2026); all attendants must stay at the “Riva del Sole Resort & SPA”. Booking accommodation at the Riva del Sole must be made exclusively using the accommodation form attached to the registration confirmation email. No other methods must be used (if you use other booking methods the hotel will cancel the reservation). Finally, it is not possible to extend the stay, the special accommodation rates are valid only for the period of the course, no exceptions will be made.

ACDL is a residential course, so all lecturers and participants must reside in the same Hotel (Riva del Sole Resort & SPA). No exceptions are made.

For privacy reasons, the Hotel cannot match people. If you have someone to share the apartment with (or a double room in Hotel), please send to the Hotel the name, surname and email address. Otherwise the solution is to book a hotel room in single use.

Please note that only ACDL registered participants can book a room (in hotel or apartment) at the Riva del Sole Resort & SPA with the accommodation form attached in the registration email and with the ACDL Discounted Rates. The Booking Office of the Riva del Sole Resort & SPA will verify the names of the participants and the corresponding registration number to confirm the booking.

Anyone interested in participating in ACDL 2026 should register as soon as possible.

See you in Riva del Sole & SPA - Tuscany in June 2026!

Fee info