March Meetup - 2 speakers!

We are delighted to welcome you to our second meetup of the year! First up we have Abhinav Jindal with "Data-warehouse Querying using Free text - with Sentence Transformers". Following this we have Andy Burgin with "Explaining Large Language Models To Developers"

If you would like to volunteer as a speaker please reach out to us at **lds@jumpingrivers.com**.

Schedule

18:00--18:45h: Refreshments (Food served on first come first served basis)

18:45--18:50h: Welcome

18:50--19:25: Talk 1 "Data-warehouse Querying using Free text - with Sentence Transformers"

The talk focuses on a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) solution, using natural language processing to solve a simple business problem. Using the fundamental methodology powering LLMs, we will discuss how intuitively we can build data querying tools whilst making querying accessible to those with little-to-no know-how of SQL or other query languages. The proposed solution, which will be the focus of the talk, is under active development, for deployment at the National Institute of HealthCare Research. Through such projects, the speaker hopes to demystify 'AI' by building simple, interpretable data science tools.

https://github.com/AbhinavJindalNIHR/RAG-search

19:25--20:00h: Talk 2 "Explaining Large Language Models To Developers"

Large Language Models are the brains behind AI services and applications we use every day. They appear to "know" and "understand" almost everything, but how can such breadth of knowledge be condensed down to a file that comfortably fits on a memory card?
Perhaps a more important question is how do you explain that to a group of developers that want to know the inner workings without a torrent of maths, code and endless jargon - well a picture is worth a thousand words...
In this talk I'll explain how I built a recent presentation for the DDDNorth conference that teaches inner workings of large language models to Developers. I'll run through the narrative of the talk and show how I built the visualisations of the transformer including the input embeddings, attention mechanism, multilayer perceptron and output calculations - sharing all the charts, animations and repo full of tools.

Bio 1: Abhinav Jindal

Abhinav Jindal AKA Jin is a Data & Analytics Specialist and emerging Data Scientist, working with the National Institute of HealthCare Research, who has transitioned from a career in IT risk consulting to data in healthcare. A firm believer in sharing knowledge and use of freely open-source software (FOSS), he is building his collection of GitHub repos. Outside of work, he is trying to establish himself as a part-time photographer; and can be found indulging in kayaking, endurance cycling, and occasional open-mics with the guitar in and around Leeds.

Bio 2: Andy Burgin

GenAI fettler, DevEx, Kubernetes and DevOps | Keynote Speaker | DevOpsDays London Organiser.

Andy is by day a Principal Platform Engineer at gambling firm, by night an opensource AI contributor working with LLMs and AI applications running in Kubernetes. Currently working with K8sGPT to help analyse and diagnose faults on Kubernetes clusters. He also is a small part of the organizing team for DevOpsDays London and ran the DevOps meetup in Leeds for almost a decade hosting over 50 events. He’s attended and has spoken at a bunch of DevOps conferences and in his own words is "an all-round DevOps nuisance".

News and Announcements

Have a news item or announcement you'd like to make about upcoming data events or job opportunities in Leeds? Comment below or contact us directly (**lds@jumpingrivers.com**) and we'll do our best to circulate this information at the end of the session.

Please contact the organisers if you would like to volunteer as a speaker for future events.