Summer School 2026

Fourth edition.
Nuffield College,
Oxford.

Programme details, confirmed topics, and costs and support for the 2026 school. Applications are closed; applicants have been notified and this year's cohort is confirmed. We look forward to welcoming participants to Nuffield College, 13–17 July.

§ 01 · Programme
13–17 July 2026

The 2026 programme.

Five days at Nuffield College, 09:00–17:00 daily, combining technical depth with research application. The week is built around three components:

Industry lectures & seminars

Technical foundations from practitioners building language models in industry — efficient and continual learning, agents and evaluation, inference economics, and LLM data and RL environments.

Collaborative research project

A Kaggle-style prediction competition on a real social science research problem. Teams work through afternoon lab sessions, with guidance available from industry participants.

Social science guest talks

Invited researchers present social science applications: opinion prediction, document classification, and text-as-data methods, connecting the technical sessions to real research problems.

Day by day

The week at a glance.

Morning lectures and seminars, afternoon group research, closing guest talks. “Group research” is the participants' collaborative project work. Click a speaker to jump to their profile.

Mon · 13 Jul
  1. 09:00Morning Coffee
  2. 09:15Group Research Project Introduction
  3. 10:45Coffee Break
  4. 11:00Margaret Roberts — Research Talk
  5. 12:30Lunch
  6. 14:00Tatiana Shavrina — LLM Agents and Evaluations
  7. 15:45Coffee Break
  8. 16:00Roberto-Rafael Maura-Rivero — Research Talk
  9. 19:00Welcome Social
Tue · 14 Jul
  1. 09:00Morning Coffee
  2. 09:15Sagi Shaier — Continual Learning: Why Models Forget, and What We Can Do About It
  3. 10:45Coffee Break
  4. 11:00Group Research Project
  5. 12:30Lunch
  6. 14:00Group Research Project
  7. 15:45Coffee Break
  8. 16:00Christopher Barrie — Research Talk
Wed · 15 Jul
  1. 09:00Morning Coffee
  2. 09:15Ilya Boytsov — Efficient LLMs: Principles and Compression Techniques
  3. 10:45Oxford Walking Tour
  4. 12:30Lunch
  5. 14:00Group Research Project
  6. 15:45Coffee Break
  7. 16:00Andreu Casas — Research Talk
Thu · 16 Jul
  1. 09:00Morning Coffee
  2. 09:15Piotr Mazurek — The Economics of LLM Inference
  3. 10:45Coffee Break
  4. 11:00Tatiana Lando — Language in LLMs: Is It Solved?
  5. 12:30Lunch
  6. 14:00Group Research Project
  7. 15:45Coffee Break
  8. 16:00Group Research Project
Fri · 17 Jul
  1. 09:00Morning Coffee
  2. 09:15Sergei Skvortsov — From Days to Hours: Accelerating LLM-Driven Research with Cloud and Self-Hosted Models
  3. 10:45Coffee Break
  4. 11:00Ibragim Badertdinov — LLM Data and RL Environments
  5. 12:30Lunch
  6. 14:00Group Research Project Presentations
  7. 15:45Coffee Break
  8. 16:00Elliott Ash — Research Talk

The programme is close to final and may still see minor adjustments. For a sense of how the week runs, see the 2025 programme. Materials from past editions are on GitHub.

§ 02 · Speakers
Confirmed · more to follow

Speakers.

More speakers will be announced as confirmations land. If you are interested in contributing as a speaker or social science presenter, reach out directly.

Get in touch
§ 03 · Arrangements
Costs & funding

Tuition is free.
We aim to remove every barrier we can.

The school is designed so that cost is not a barrier. All tuition is free for admitted participants.

Tuition

The full programme (lectures, seminars, coding labs, and research project support) is free of charge for all admitted participants.

Accommodation & meals

Accommodation is at participants' own expense. Admitted participants will receive a list of recommended nearby hotels and affordable options in Oxford.

We expect to cover meals during the school day; details will be confirmed with admitted participants.

Travel scholarships

We have offered travel support in previous editions, but travel scholarships are not available for 2026. Tuition remains free for all admitted participants.

§ 04 · Venue
Nuffield College

Where we will meet.

All sessions take place at Nuffield College, in central Oxford. Visitors should use the main entrance on Worcester Street, a short walk from Oxford train station.

Nuffield College
New Road & Worcester Street
Oxford OX1 1NF
United Kingdom

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