ESDS Advanced launches July 20, 2026 and runs in four weeks: two
back-to-back in summer 2026 — the weeks of July 20–24 and July 27–31
— and two in winter 2026–27 (dates TBD). All times are Eastern (ET).
Register here before the course
begins.
- In person: the Veach-Baley building in Asheville, NC.
- Remote: live over Zoom (links posted on each week's schedule page), with
recordings posted to this site after each session.
Daily structure
- Mornings (9:00 AM–12:00 PM ET): instructor-led lectures with
hands-on practice. Sessions run 50 minutes with 10-minute breaks between
them — see the weekly schedule pages for exact timing.
- Team time & office hours (1:00–2:00 PM ET, Weeks 1–2): team project
time and office hours — teams work together, participants get questions
answered, and instructors are on hand for mentoring and practice. Open to
everyone; team participation is optional.
Weekly structure
The course spans four weeks, one module per week:
- Week 1 — Agentic Cowork Tools (July 20–24, 2026). LLMs and agents,
Claude and Claude Cowork, skills and tools, and Claude Code.
- Week 2 — Agentic Systems (July 27–31, 2026). REACT loops and
harnesses, observability, memory, security, and running agents in
production.
- Week 3 — Deep Learning (winter 2026–27, dates TBD). Architecting,
building, training, and tuning deep learning models.
- Week 4 — Foundation Models in Research (winter 2026–27, dates TBD).
Building on the deep learning core: evaluating models, building on other
models, and incorporating them intelligibly into research work.
Each week's schedule page in the sidebar has the day-by-day detail.
Cost & equipment
- No cost to NOAA and NCICS participants — compute, cloud resources, and AI
usage are covered through a partnership with AWS.
- You only need a laptop, the ability to install software on it, and an
internet connection. See the
Setup & Day 0 Checklist for what to install
before Day 1.
Attendance & credit
- Partial attendance is allowed: Week 1 can be taken on its own; Weeks 2
through 4 each require Week 1 first.
- There is no pass/fail and no certification — the course is about the
capabilities you leave with.
Getting help
- Course Slack channels — the primary place for questions, links, and
announcements (invitation sent after registration).
- Office hours — the daily 1:00–2:00 PM team time and office hours
session, plus the optional setup session on July 17.
- Course instructors — reachable on Slack throughout.
Course content
This site is the primary dissemination mechanism for the course content. It
contains the materials, slides, recordings, and other resources you need to
follow along and complete the course. Use the navigation menu on the left to
access each section.