AI Tools provides a comprehensive introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for students of all disciplines. The course introduces students to various AI tools that can enhance their academic performance and overall college experience. Students will learn how to leverage AI technologies to improve study habits, enhance research skills, and augment their creativity. Through interactive sessions and hands-on activities, students will gain practical knowledge and skills to use AI tools for academic and personal success in college.

This workshop introduces participants to IBM SPSS Statistics for data analysis. Attendees will learn how to install and license SPSS, manage datasets, perform basic statistical analyses, and interpret results. By the end of the session, participants will have the confidence to use SPSS for coursework, research, and everyday statistical tasks.

This workshop introduces participants to the art of communicating effectively with large language models. Attendees will learn the fundamentals of prompt structure, including how to write clear instructions, provide context, and use examples to guide model output. The workshop covers key concepts such as context and context windows, and how understanding these limitations can improve the quality and relevance of AI-generated responses. Participants will also explore techniques like chain-of-thought prompting, role assignment, iterative refinement, and strategies for reducing ambiguity and hallucination. Through hands-on practice, the attendees will be able to gain the skills needed to craft effective prompts for various academic or personal applications.

This monthly workshop walks participants through getting started on Unity, a high-performance computing cluster hosted at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center and available to URI researchers. Geared toward new users, the session covers requesting and setting up a Unity account, connecting to the cluster over SSH, navigating the filesystem and understanding storage and permissions, loading software modules, and submitting and monitoring jobs with SLURM. Attendees will also learn where to find documentation and how to reach the Research Computing team for further help. While the material is aimed at newcomers, the session is adapted to the experience level of those attending, so returning users are welcome to bring specific questions about their own workflows.

This series of workshops is intended for anyone using bioinformatics softwares on the UNITY high-performance computing platform. Over the course of three sessions, participants will explore softwares available on UNITY to preprocess sequencing data before analysis, perform sequence assembly and variant calling. Each workshop will include a demonstration on how to use these tools efficiently.

This workshop provides a beginner-friendly introduction to R and RStudio for data analysis and visualization. Participants will learn how to import data, perform basic data manipulation, create simple graphs, and run introductory statistical analyses. Through hands-on exercises, attendees will gain the foundational skills needed to use R for coursework and research.

This workshop is presented by the University of Rhode Island AI Lab.

Over the past several decades, decreasing sequencing costs have resulted in the generation of vast amounts of biological data, providing researchers with the opportunity to tackle complex biological questions but also presenting a great computational challenge. Many analyses now are performed on high performance computing clusters such as Unity which offer enough computational power to work with such data. This workshop will offer a practical introduction to how to get started with conducting bioinformatics analyses on Unity and take participants through all of the steps required to run a program on Unity.

Join Unity facilitators for an Introduction to Unity Onboarding session. Though this workshop is intended for users new to Unity, all Unity users are welcome! Topics covered include logging on via SSH and Unity OnDemand, submitting batch and interactive command-line Slurm jobs for MPI parallelized or multithreaded applications, using the Unity OnDemand graphical applications (JupyterLab, RStudio, etc), and using the Unity OnDemand job composer. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one at https://account.unityhpc.org/

Snakemake is a workflow engine for piping data through analysis pipelines. While particularly popular in the bioinformatics community, Snakemake is useful across any field that involves pipelines of data processing and analysis. This workshop will introduce using Snakemake on Unity and demonstrate a workflow on metagenomics data. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one by visiting the Unity Portal.

Git, a version control software, lets you retain a record of changes throughout the history of your software. Version control is essential for reproducible, traceable science and is useful for any field with a computational component. This workshop will introduce you to the fundamentals of version control with git and how to incorporate version control into your Unity workflow. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one by visiting the Unity Portal.

Join Unity facilitators for an Introduction to Unity Onboarding session. Though this workshop is intended for users new to Unity, all Unity users are welcome! Topics covered include logging on via SSH and Unity OnDemand, submitting batch and interactive command-line Slurm jobs for MPI parallelized or multithreaded applications, using the Unity OnDemand graphical applications (JupyterLab, RStudio, etc), and using the Unity OnDemand job composer. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one at https://account.unityhpc.org/

Unity facilitator Connor Kenyon of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will present a workshop on the available GPU resources on Unity. During this workshop, participants will gain experience accessing and utilizing a GPU in both interactive Jupyter sessions as well as with SLURM. Talking points will include requesting an overview of available resources, accessing GPUs on Unity, and a brief introduction to available GPU accelerated software as well as tools for profiling GPU code. This workshop will provide direct practical experience by setting up a Jupyter notebook environment for popular machine learning software such as PyTorch and tensorflow on the Unity OnDemand interface. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one by visiting the Unity Portal.

Unity facilitator Cecile Cres of the University of Rhode Island will present a workshop on ColabFold. During this workshop, participants will gain experience with protein structure prediction using Colabfold. Talking points will include prediction of single and complex structures, how to request computer resources efficiently and how to interpret the predicted protein models. This workshop will provide direct practical experience by using a Jupyter notebook on the Unity OnDemand interface. This workshop will be held remotely via Zoom. Please register for a Unity account prior to the workshop if you do not already have one by visiting the Unity Portal.