AI Alignment @ IllinoisAI Alignment
DiscordDashboard

The six tracks

Start with Fundamentals. Where you go after it depends on what you want to do.

The owl waters a sapling beside a stake marked Fundamentals, and it grows into a branching tree with a label for each of the other five tracks. The robot jumps for one and gets flung off, a blue route runs up the trunk to every label, and the view flies into a fruit that holds the whole scene again.

Start here

Fundamentals

For
New members, and anyone coming to AI for the first time
Cadence
Weekly
Session
45 to 60 minutes
Leads
Maxwell Dodson, Utkarsh Singh

No machine learning background needed. How these systems are trained, how they fail, and what people are doing about it.

  • Completion requires attending 80% of sessions.
  • Ends with a capstone discussion that helps place you into your next track.

Singularity Reading Club

For
Open to every member and to non-members, undergraduate and graduate
Leads
Evan Coats

Open discussions and debate on sci-fi, philosophy, and technology. Self-reference and incompleteness, machines that build machines, dark forests, and the forecasts that put a date on all of it.

  • The list runs from popular science to graduate-level texts.

On the list

  1. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and StrategiesNick Bostrom
  2. Theory of Self-Reproducing AutomataJohn von Neumann
  3. The AI 2027 forecast

Join the Discord and opt in to Singularity Club announcements for the next reading, the rest of the list, and to put a title on it yourself.

Research Fellowship

For
Application-based, with prior programming experience
Cadence
Weekly
Session
60 minutes
Leads
Advait Yadav, Daniel Elliott, Evan Coats, Himnish Hunma, Mithil Salunkhe

Technical and project-based. You pick a question, we supply compute and a mentor, and you finish with a real project or paper.

  • Week 1 is an initial screening plus a project proposal, so members can decide whether to team up.
  • Weekly meetings to share progress, ask questions of the cohort, and set next week's goals.
  • Groups may pivot their goals up to week 7 with sufficient explanation and approval.
  • Members present their work to the club at the end of the semester and aim to submit it for external review.

Policy Reading Group

For
Member tier and above, selective by interest
Cadence
Weekly to biweekly
Leads
Sahib Bedi, Elizabeth Vollentine

AI governance and regulation, from Illinois state developments up to international coordination. No tech background needed.

Workshops

For
Open to all members, and to non-members
Cadence
Monthly
Leads
Evan Coats

Hands-on afternoons through the semester. Laptops out, nothing to sign up for.

  • Planned for this semester: AI x biosecurity, self-modifying and recursive AI models, and reinforcement learning.

Speakers & Socials

For
All members
Cadence
Monthly
Session
60 minutes

The club's monthly general meeting. Researchers from Illinois and outside it, talking about what they actually work on, plus dinners and game nights.

  • Board game nights and a debate party through the semester.

Fall 2026

Get the spring forms by email

Fundamentals, the Research Fellowship and the Policy Reading Group are all closed for the fall. All three open again in spring 2027.