Sunday Lab #1: ICPC Primer, Academic Reading Circle (Foundations of LLM Scaling), and Socials
Hosted by the ACM ASU Chapter, Sunday Labs is a recurring, full-day academic + community-building experience that blends problem-solving, research literacy, and interdisciplinary connection into one immersive Sunday.
🗓️ Date & Time: Sunday, Jan 25, 2026 | 11:00 AM–5:00 PM
đź“Ť Location: Durham Hall 106 (DH 106)
👥 Estimated attendance: 30–40 students per session
For more info and RSVP: https://asu.acm.org/rsvp
What to expect:
11:00 AM–1:00 PM — ICPC Primer (Problem Set + Guided Mentorship)
Work through two Codeforces problems collaboratively with guided instruction from Souradeep Banerjee. We’ll focus on algorithmic thinking, competitive programming patterns, and real-time problem-solving strategies—great for anyone exploring ICPC prep or sharpening fundamentals.
1:00 PM–2:00 PM — Lunch + Social
A relaxed hour to meet students from other clubs and technical communities, build connections, and talk ideas beyond classes and projects.
2:00 PM–4:00 PM — Academic Reading Circle: “Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models (Chinchilla)”
We’ll do a structured deep-dive into a landmark paper that revisits LLM scaling laws and argues that, under fixed compute budgets, models are often better smaller + trained on more data—reshaping how we think about efficient pretraining and deployment tradeoffs.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556
Academic outcomes you’ll leave with:
* Stronger ICPC-style problem-solving habits and patterns
* A practical framework for reading, critiquing, and discussing modern AI papers
* Better interdisciplinary communication through social networking
* Exposure to both technical depth and community leadership within ACM
🎯 Target audience: CS + engineering students interested in competitive programming, AI research, and academic community-building—whether you’re ICPC-curious, research-bound, or just looking to plug into a high-signal technical community.
âś… Come for the skills. Stay for the people.
