Offline and intensive. Short lectures, long hands-on sessions. Work on your own, as well as in groups.
AI is an umbrella term which covers many things like Generative AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning etc. This workshop is going to look at aspects related to literature search, brainstorming, reading, writing and presentation. These are things that occupy a lot of time for a researcher, and our entire aim is to show you how AI can help, and what are the caveats. This workshop will not teach you how to use AI to discern patterns in your data or how to make a LLM or SLM.
We strongly recommend that you look at the last two sections on this page to figure out what this workshop will and will not do. If you still have doubts, feel free to drop an email to biostats@acads.iiserpune.ac.in.
Yes, this workshop will not require you to code.
Accommodation will be at the IISER Pune hostel on a room sharing basis. It will be very basic and you will make direct payments to the IISER hostel (@Rs 600 per day per person, double sharing, food not included). If you are a local, or can make other accommodation arrangements, please feel free to do so.
If you write to us up to 7-days befors the workshop, we will try, but cannot give you a guarantee. If you tell us less than 7-days before the workshop, not possible.
Sorry, absolutely not possible. Also, it defeats one of the major purposes of the workshop, which is creating a bunch of systems on YOUR own machine, that you can use afterwards.
This workshop is designed for those who are already somewhat deep into research in some academic problem. Bachelor's students, who are typically just starting on their research journey, will not be benefitted by this to the same extent.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 are only for those people who are currently enrolled as students (Masters / PhD / Post Doc). Anyone who is not enrolled as a student has to apply as Tier 3.
This workshop has two major goals: a) to talk about the best available tools at that moment, b) to talk about solutions that are as affordable as possible, particularly for MSc /PhD students. Progress in AI is happening at an extremely rapid pace. New tools are announced almost every week, and pricing of the tools change very rapidly. More critically, the capabilities of the tools are also changing rapidly, and not always for the better. For example, we did a mini-workshop at IISER Pune in the month of March 2025, which covered many of the topics that we are supposed to discuss here. Yet, while creating the syllabus for the current workshop, we realized that most of what we discussed in March need to be substantially revised as of this date. This is the reason for which we are not committing on covering any tool / platform (except for say Google Colab or Hugging Face, which are very stable platforms).
Sorry, refunds are not possible for this workshop. Therefore, please register only if you are absolutely sure that you are going to be able to make it to Pune on 12-14 December.
No. Seats are going to be filled on a first-come-first-served basis. However, since there are three tiers, and the total number of participants is limited, IISER Pune can decide to restrict the number of participants in a particular tier to a specific number.
Sorry, a discount is not possible.
We will only talk about those tools that are either free or have a generous free tier. We are also currently talking to various AI companies to see if they will give extended free subscriptions to participants of this workshop or not. However, this is still under process, and we are going to have a better idea about this only towards the start date of the workshop. In any case, please be assured that we will only cover those tools that you will either get to carry with you, or will be able to get a very good feel during the workshop.
The focus of this workshop is to use AI as a tool for conducting scientific research. When you use something as a tool, you do not become an expert in it. Therefore, this workshop will NOT make you a AI developer. However, it can potentially make you a more efficient researcher, which can have its own benefits.
Any kind of professional who needs to improve the kinds of skills mentioned on this page. This includes, but is not limited to, industrial researchers, science journalists, science communicators, lecturers and policy makers.
In general yes. However, the extent might depend on your use case. Most of the things that we will talk about will apply to any kind of research. However, some of the tools that we will use might be specific to STEM literature (although many of the tools will be generic). Since we are scientists, the way we will make our agents/assistants will again be science-biased. However, we will teach enough for you to be able to modify the agents/assistants to suit your own purpose. But that will mean a lot of subject-specific inputs from your side. In case you have doubts, we will recommend that you drop an email to biostats@iiserpune.ac.in specifying your use case.