Program Agenda

July 31 – August 1, 2026  •  Harvard University

📶 Wi-Fi Access

Attendees can connect using Eduroam, or register for Harvard guest Wi-Fi, which lasts for 24 hours. Instructions for registering are available here.

🗺️ Campus Map

Annotated Harvard campus map showing STAI-X 2026 venues

Click the map to open the full-size image.

Day 1 — Friday, July 31, 2026

Short Courses, Data Challenge Demo, & Evening Reception

Three morning short courses (8:00 AM – 12:00 PM) and three afternoon short courses (1:00 PM – 5:00 PM) run in parallel. Participants may register for one morning and one afternoon course. The day closes with a demo session of the challenge awardees and a welcome reception in the evening.

Venues — Maxwell-Dworkin (MD): 33 Oxford Street  •  Divinity School (DS): 45 Francis Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138. Rooms: G115, G125, G135 in MD and James Room and Café Commons in DS.

Time Program Item Title Instructor(s)
8:00 – 8:30 AMRegistration & Breakfast📍 MD — G100 Lobby——
8:00 AM – 12:00 PMSC1 — Morning Track A📍 MD — Room G-115Agentic AI: From Zero to InfinityTian ZhengColumbia University
8:00 AM – 12:00 PMSC2 — Morning Track B📍 MD — Room G-135Theory of Scaling in Modern Deep Learning
Soufiane HayouJohns Hopkins University
Nikhil GhoshFlatiron Institute
8:00 AM – 12:00 PMSC3 — Morning Track C📍 MD — Room G-125An Overview of LLMs for StatisticiansLinjun ZhangRutgers University
10:00 – 10:15 AMCoffee Break📍 MD — G100 Lobby——
12:00 – 1:00 PMLunch Break📍 MD — G100 Lobby——
1:00 – 5:00 PMSC4 — Afternoon Track A📍 MD — Room G-135Reinforcement Learning: Foundations & ApplicationsChengchun ShiLondon School of Economics
1:00 – 5:00 PMSC5 — Afternoon Track B📍 MD — Room G-125AI in Accelerating Clinical Trials & Drug Development
Alexia IasonosMemorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
John O'QuigleyUniversity College London
1:00 – 5:00 PMSC6 — Afternoon Track C📍 MD — Room G-115Theory for Diffusion Models: Continuous & DiscreteSitan ChenHarvard University
3:00 – 3:15 PMCoffee Break📍 MD — G100 Lobby——
5:15 – 6:00 PMData Challenge Demo📍 DS — James RoomSupported by Jump TradingDemo by the Challenge awardees—
6:00 – 7:45 PMWelcome Reception📍 DS — Café CommonsOpen to all attendees and instructors—

Bioconductor Workshop  ·  part of STAI-X’26 · additional sign-up

AI for the Bioconductor Ecosystem: Developers, Infrastructure, and Community

📍 Maxwell-Dworkin — Room 234

Morning & afternoon sessions  •  Free (breakfast & lunch provided)  •  Spots limited, registration required: registration form.

Day 2 — Saturday, August 1, 2026

Main Conference Day

Each of Sessions 1, 2, and 3 runs 1 hour 30 minutes and contains 5 talks: 2 invited talks (25 min each, 5 min Q&A) followed by 3 short paper award talks (8 min each, 2 min Q&A). The lightning talk session is 30 minutes by 9 stellar abstract award winners (3 min each).

Venues — Science Center (SC): 1 Oxford Street (main conference)  •  Northwest (NW): 52 Oxford Street (lunch), Cambridge, MA 02138.

Time Talk Speaker
8:00 – 8:50 AMBreakfast📍 Science Center—
8:50 – 9:00 AMWelcome and Opening Remarks📍 Science Center — Hall C—
Session 1  ·  9:00 – 10:30 AM  ·  Chair: Wenyi Wang  ·  📍 Science Center — Hall C
9:00 – 9:30 AMInvited TalkTraining in Imagination or Learning by Telling the Truth — A Debate on World ModelEric XingMBZUAI & Carnegie Mellon University
9:30 – 10:00 AMInvited TalkLabOS: The AI-XR Co-Scientist That Sees and Works With HumansMengdi WangPrinceton University
10:00 – 10:10 AMPaper Award TalkGenerative AI and Entrepreneurship: A Spatial Synthetic Difference-in-Differences ApproachJeff CaiUniversity of Notre Dame
10:10 – 10:20 AMPaper Award TalkA Deep Generative Framework for Right-Censored Survival Data with Distribution-Matching RegularizationYanran Li, Zexi CaiColumbia University
10:20 – 10:30 AMPaper Award TalkCrossHONA: Cross-species HOmologous and Non-homologous gene-aware framework for transcriptomics integration and AnnotationRuohan WangCenter for Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University
10:30 – 11:00 AMCoffee Break📍 Science Center—
Session 2  ·  11:00 AM – 12:30 PM  ·  Chair: Linjun Zhang  ·  📍 Science Center — Hall C
11:00 – 11:30 AMInvited TalkFrom Entropy to Epiplexity: Rethinking Information for Computationally Bounded IntelligenceAndrew WilsonNew York University
11:30 AM – 12:00 PMInvited TalkSynthetic Data for Black-Box ValidationMartin WainwrightMassachusetts Institute of Technology
12:00 – 12:10 PMPaper Award TalkSTAVAT: Stratified Anytime-Valid Atom Sampling for LLM Tier PlacementPatrick VosslerUniversity of California, San Francisco
12:10 – 12:20 PMPaper Award TalkVariance-aware Reward Modeling with Anchor GuidanceShuxing FangThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University
12:20 – 12:30 PMPaper Award TalkMembership Inference via Pairwise Likelihood RatiosShengjie NiuThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University
12:30 – 1:40 PMLunch Break & Round Tables📍 Northwest Building — Basement B100 (~6 min walk from Science Center)—
1:40 – 2:00 PMAward Ceremony📍 Science Center — Hall C—
Session 3  ·  2:00 – 3:30 PM  ·  Chair: Edgar Dobriban  ·  📍 Science Center — Hall C
2:00 – 2:30 PMInvited TalkFeature Learning and the Linear Representation Hypothesis for Steering and Monitoring LLMsMisha BelkinUniversity of California San Diego
2:30 – 3:00 PMInvited TalkStatlib: A Statistical Library for Research, Education, and Beyond in an AI WorldRajarshi MukherjeeHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
3:00 – 3:10 PMPaper Award TalkWahkon: A Statistically Principled Deep RKHS Superposition NetworkYongkai ChenHarvard University
3:10 – 3:20 PMPaper Award TalkAI4BayesCode: From Natural Language Descriptions to Validated Modular Stateful Bayesian SamplersJungang ZouDepartment of Biostatistics, Columbia University
3:20 – 3:30 PMPaper Award TalkDensity-Informed Pseudo-Counts for Calibrated Evidential Deep LearningPietro CarlottiUniversity of Texas at Austin
3:30 – 4:00 PMCoffee Break📍 Science Center—
4:00 – 5:00 PMPanel Discussion📍 Science Center — Hall CCo-moderated panel + audience Q&A
Panel — Co-moderators & Panelists

Co-moderators: Xihong Lin — Harvard University; Brittany Seguno — National Academy of Sciences

Panelists:

  • Kathy Ensor — Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University; Co-Chair, NASEM Report on Frontier of Statistics: 2035 and Beyond
  • Theresa Kim — Co-chair of the AI in Trans-NIH Initiative in Behavioral and Social Science Research, NIH
  • Stefan Wild — Director of Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Ellen Zegura — AI Strategy Lead, Office of the Director, NSF; Fleming Chair and Professor, School of Computer Science, Georgia Tech
5:00 – 5:30 PMStellar Abstract Lightning Talks📍 Science Center — Hall C9 × 3-min Stellar Abstract Award talks
Stellar Abstract Award Winners
  1. SPID: Distilled Protein Backbone Generation — Liyang Xie, The University of Texas at Austin
  2. Deciphering Small Sequence Differences in T Cell Receptor-Antigen Pairing — Yi Han, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
  3. Incorporating LLM Embeddings for Variation Across the Human Genome — Hongqian Niu, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  4. DML-BM: Double Machine Learning for Block-wise Missing Data with Applications in Alzheimer's Disease Progression and Cognitive Functions — Borui Tang, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  5. Precision Physical Activity Prescription via Reinforcement Learning for Functional Actions — Gefei Lin, The George Washington University
  6. Strategic Feature Selection and Regularization — Pratik Patil, The University of Texas at Austin
  7. Vertical Consensus Inference for High-Dimensional Random Partition — Khai Nguyen, The University of Texas at Austin
  8. Adaptive Auditing of AI Systems with Anytime-Valid Guarantees — Siyu Zhou, University of California, San Francisco
  9. Distributional Evaluation of Generative Models via Relative Density Ratio — Yuliang Xu, University of Michigan
5:30 – 5:35 PMClosing Remarks📍 Science Center — Hall C—
5:35 – 7:30 PMPoster Session & Reception Supported by Jump Trading📍 Science CenterPosters, food & beverages