From Research Project to Open Source Ecosystem: Bring Your Academic PyTorch Project to PyTorchCon NA
The PyTorch Foundation OSPO & Academic Outreach Working Group has opened a call for academic PyTorch projects to take part in an Academic Workshop focused on Education & Community Adoption. The workshop is part of Day 0 programming ahead of PyTorch Conference North America 2026, with a submission deadline of September 30, 2026, at midnight PT.
Submissions are invited from students, researchers, faculty, research engineers, university labs, Academic OSPOs, and research institutions. Projects must be open source and created within academia, substantially developed by academic contributors, or emerging from academic research using PyTorch, DeepSpeed, Helion, Ray, Safetensors, and vLLM. Projects can come from anywhere in the world, and applicants do not need a large institution, thousands of users, or a mature open source organization.
Eight selected projects will be invited to present lightning talks of five minutes each. Presenters must attend in person. Talks are to cover the problem being solved, how the project uses or extends PyTorch Foundation hosted projects, its research context, current users, why it could matter to the broader community, and what support could help it reach its next stage. The talks are followed by a hands-on workshop and mentor office hours with maintainers, open source program managers, industry and research professionals, and community contributors.
Projects are evaluated on academic relevance, ecosystem relevance, open source readiness, potential impact, team commitment, and cohort diversity. The working group says submissions should have a public repository, an open source license, and enough documentation for mentors to review. Teams are asked to describe the project, its academic origin, its usefulness, and where they are stuck, such as documentation, governance, packaging, testing, contributors, or ecosystem readiness. Registration for the event is separate from the PyTorch Conference.
Based on reporting from the original publisher. Visit the source for full context and later updates.
Publisher excerpt
Some of the most interesting work being built with PyTorch starts in universities, research labs, student groups, and academic institutions. A new model architecture. A library created to support a...