How Can I Help?
Funding: We fund this camp through volunteers and donations from a variety of university departments and corporate sponsors which allows us to purchase lunch for the campers each day, cover camp-fee waivers and bus passes for those who request it (allowing us to be accessible to students with a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds), and give our faithful instructors and TAs a small stipend. You can donate yourself at the button below or talk to your organization for donations. On the donation form, under special options/special instructions, please indicate "2024 Machine Learning Summer Day Camp".
Make a Gift
Volunteers: The students who attend this camp will be learning about the importance of data in their lives and all the ways they can extract information from it. Your experience in the industry can be a valuable addition to contextualize our in-class lectures.
To volunteer: Contact Gary Hatfield (garyh@umn.edu) and/or Shelby Ziccardi (zicca010@umn.edu).
- Guest Speakers: Each day of our camp session we bring in a guest speaker from local organizations to discuss the work they are doing and how it connects to the topics the students are learning.
- A guest speaker volunteer would organize a presentation (~45min) on their path to data science and the kinds of work they are doing now and be prepared for students to ask questions.
- Panel Speakers: On Thursday each week, instead of a speaker, we bring a panel of professionals together so the students can ask their own questions about what life looks like as a data scientist and how they got to their current positions.
- A panel member volunteer would come to our campus for 1hr on Thursday and field questions from students.
- Teaching Assistants: Throughout the camp, the students will be working on projects where they learn how to develop their own questions and use data-driven methods to answer them. Much of this work ends up being discussions and debugging with our instructors or TAs.
- A teaching assistant volunteer would come to our campus for some time during the day (e.g. for a couple hours Tuesday morning or a Wednesday afternoon) and work with students on their projects, providing advice and help.
- Guest Lecturer: In addition to their project work, the students will be hearing a number of lectures about different machine learning/data science topics such as decision trees, SVMs, and k-means clustering. These lectures are always more interesting for students when hearing from people other than the instructors they’ve been listening to all week.
- A guest lecturer volunteer would put together and deliver a lecture on machine learning content to our students.
Share a Dataset: Throughout the camp, the students practice implementing the techniques they learn on a number of different datasets. We collect these datasets from sites like Kaggle where we can access relatively simple, cleaned, documented data. However sometimes these datasets are not the most interesting for students and we end up repeating their use multiple times. If you or your company has any relatively simple datasets that you would be willing to share with our students, they would love to get their hands on some real useful data. We would, of course, abide by any privacy or security requirements that can.
To submit a Dataset: Contact Gary Hatfield (garyh@umn.edu) and/or Shelby Ziccardi (zicca010@umn.edu).
Return to: 2024 < RUN>: \ THE\ WORLD Machine Learning Summer Day Camp
