Welcome

Welcome to Day 1 of the course. Over the next three days (July 22 to 24) you will work as a human-AI team to build a national influenza hospitalization forecasting pipeline from real CDC data, all the way to a FluSight-ready model.

Today is about setup and your first pass through the workflow: get GitHub and VS Code working, learn how we team with an AI assistant, then clean the data and produce your first epicurve.

The tools are just tools. The real work is the modeling, and you stay the expert making the decisions.

What today covers

By the end of today you will be able to:

  • Fork the course repository and clone it into VS Code
  • Install the R extension and set up GitHub Copilot as your AI assistant
  • Explain how rules.md (written by you) and agents.md (generated by AI) fit together
  • Run the Human-AI Iteration Loop end to end on the data cleaning phase
  • Commit your results to your fork and open a pull request to the class repository

Today’s flow

  1. Introductions & Lecture 1 (Overview of Forecasting)

  2. Lecture 2: Introduction to AI and Human-AI Teaming

  3. Lab overview and Orientation

  4. Introduction to GitHub, including forking the course repository

  5. Introduction to VS Code: R extension, GitHub Copilot, cloning your fork, and your working directory

  6. Activity 1: Data Cleaning and Visuals

  7. GitHub commits and pull requests

Resources

Getting help

  • Ask a TA during activity blocks
  • Post in the course Slack channel
  • Remember that GitHub and VS Code are a small piece of the picture, not the focus. If something sparks your curiosity, our door is always open.
  • If you have ANY installation problems, please let us know sooner than later.