CAIAC Advanced Technical Fellowship
Columbia AI Alignment Club · Fall 2026
The advanced technical fellowship is aimed towards hands-on exposure to frontier AI safety tools and methods. Fellows will be placed into (rotating) groups of 3-4 students that will work together through that week's ARENA curriculum.
Each week, I'll create a new page here with notes on the week's content.
Schedule
FundamentalsMech InterpLLM EvalsAlignment ScienceCapstone
| Week | Dates | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Sep 29 – Oct 6 | ARENA Chapter 0 (Fundamentals)FundamentalsPosted |
| Week 2 | Oct 6 – Oct 13 | ARENA 1.1 (Transformers from Scratch)Mech InterpPosted |
| Week 3 | Oct 13 – Oct 20 | Week 1/2 Catch-up |
| Week 4 | Oct 20 – Oct 27 | ARENA 1.2 (Intro to Mech Interp)Mech InterpPosted |
| Week 5 | Oct 27 – Nov 3 | ARENA 3.1 (Intro to Evals)LLM Evals |
| Week 6 | Nov 3 – Nov 10 | ARENA 3.2 (Dataset Generation)LLM Evals |
| Week 7 | Nov 10 – Nov 17 | ARENA 1.3.2 (Function Vectors & Model Steering)Mech Interp |
| Week 8 | Nov 17 – Nov 24 | ARENA 4.4 (LLM Psychology & Persona Vectors)Alignment Science |
| Skip | Nov 24 – Dec 1 | No new material (Thanksgiving Break) |
| Week 9 | Dec 1 – Dec 8 | ARENA 4.2 (Science of Misalignment)Alignment Science |
| Week 10 | Dec 8 – Dec 15 | Capstone ProjectsCapstone |
Contact
Nick Meyer, nick.meyer@columbia.edu