About

The Texas Colloquium on Distributed Learning: Frontiers on Agents and Systems (TL;DR 2026) will take place October 8–9, 2026, at Rice University in Houston, USA. To attend both days, it is probably best to arrive on the evening of October 7, 2026. 

Information about the first TL;DR two workshops can be found here, here, and here.

We expect around 100 participants, including domestic and international researchers working in distributed learning, multi-agent systems, federated learning, optimization, large-scale AI systems, and responsible agentic AI. TL;DR 2026 has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Rice University Creative Venture Fund, the Rice University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Rice University Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Rice University Department of Computer Science, and the Ken Kennedy Institute, with the CORE-AI OWLS Cluster providing substantial assistance in organizing the workshop. 

 Aim of the symposium

The purpose of this workshop is to gather leading researchers on Federated Learning, Distributed Computing and Large-Scale ML at Rice University; the workshop will discuss and focus on efficient distributed learning algorithms on how to train such large models using less costly/specialized computing platforms.  Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, Systems and infrastructure, Fairness, Hardware for on-device distributed learning, Privacy concerns, Optimization advances, Theoretical contributions, and Applications of distributed learning.