New Open Models and Techniques

This month's event is going to have a variety of topics!

Talks:

"Playing with Gemma 3 " - Sam Witteveen

In this talk, Sam will cover Google's latest open weights family of models "Gemma 3" which comes in 4 different flavours 1B, 4B, 12B and 27B. Sam will sow some hands on of how you can get started using these models and how to compare to some of the other recent open weights models from other companies.

"Social Signal Processing - tech4good" - Tomasz Maszczyk

In his talk, Tomasz will discuss how a system that can analyse voice, text, images and video can be used help elderly people who stay alone at home (combating loneliness, monitoring health, etc). Tomasz has been building this tech4good pro-bono, while also being a Senior Scientist at A*Star.

"Diffusion-LLMs" - Martin Andrews

Clearly diffusion models are now dominating the image generation space (GANs seem like a distant memory!). Recently, the use of diffusion in text generation is starting to show signs-of-life as an alternative (or complement) to normal ChatGPT-style autoregression. Martin will outline the various research directions, and discuss the potential commercial ramifications.

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Talks will start at 7:00pm and end at around 8:45pm, at which point people normally come up to the front for a bit of a chat with each other, and the speakers.

As always, we're actively looking for more speakers - both '30 minutes long-form', and lightning talks. For the lightning talks, we welcome folks to come and talk about something cool they've done with keras, PyTorch, JAX and/or Deep Learning for 5-10mins (so, if you have slides, then #max=10). We believe that the key ingredient for the success of a Lightning Talk is simply the cool/interesting factor. It doesn't matter whether you're an expert or an enthusiastic beginner: Given the responses we have had to previous talks, we're sure there are lots of people who would love to hear what you've been playing with. If you're interested in talking, please just introduce yourself to Martin at one of the events.