From 20 -24 January, the Netherlands eScience Center held a workshop on Machine Learning for Research at its offices at Amsterdam Science Park. During the workshop, which took place in a collaborative workspace, six teams from different disciplines and research institutions spent a week of hands-on work with machine learning experts from the eScience Center. Each team came equipped with their own data and went on to an intensive one-week collaboration with machine-learning experts from the eScience Center and SURF to explore the best machine learning strategy to tackle their research question. The core focus of the workshop was on writing and developing code to analyze the data and apply suitable machine-learning techniques. This hands-on machine-learning experience was complemented by inspiring talks by the Director of the Netherlands eScience Center, Joris van Eijnatten, Maxwell Cai (SURF) on machine and deep learning, Vincent Warmerdam (GoDataDriven) on artificial stupidity, Jakub Tomczak (VU) on deep generative modeling and Florian Huber (eScience Center) on machine learning in research – dealing with the non-ideal.