Illinois Prairie PUG Meetup

Dear Illinois Prairie PUG members,

Our next meetup is scheduled for July 16, and I am happy to announce one more "Made in Chicago" event!

Our speaker will be Robert Ismo, an ML researcher at The Printer's Company.

He will present a talk: AI, Postgres, and a deep, deep (mis)understanding
How well do our "helpful assistants" understand PostgreSQL?

Talk Description:

I'll take us through an introductory look into the field of mechanistic interpretability—a research area focused on understanding how AI models work by examining their internal computations.

As we’re flooded with AI tooling aimed at improving our work as engineers and DBAs, this talk will offer a new perspective on how to evaluate open weights models and their effectiveness. Whether it's generating tables and indexes, assisting with maintenance, or powering a text2SQL application, a language model’s internal representation of best practices, performance, and security can have far-reaching effects on the systems that depend on them.

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate how to analyze an open weights model's thought processes over a variety of PostgreSQL data.

About the speaker:

Robert is an ML researcher at The Printer's Company. He’s spent the past three years in machine learning engineering roles, primarily in the education and professional training industries, dealing with unstructured documents and content generation.

Though relatively new to PostgreSQL, Robert has explored a lot through side projects, and has been using it professionally for about a year. Like many, he’s used large language models as a learning aid for deep diving into PostgreSQL. He’s always excited to talk research and help others get more familiar with the interesting technologies they use every day.

Event location: DRW Training Center, 540 W. Madison, 25th floor.

A reminder about our venue:

- This is a high-security building, which means the names of all participants should be communicated no later than 7:30 AM on the day of the event, and all participants must present a government-issued ID to be admitted. If your meetup profile does not list your full name, please send a DM with the required information to me (Hettie). Registration for all in-person events will be closed by 7-30 AM the day of the event.
- The food order will be placed a day before the event, so I strongly encourage everybody planning to attend to RSVP at least a day before.

Please RSVP to this event only if you are attending in person.
The Zoom event will be announced closer to the date.

Hope to see you there!

Hettie Dombrovskaya
Illinois Prairie PostgreSQL User Group Organizer