PyData Southampton - 23rd Meetup
Details
Venue: Carnival House, 100 Harbour Parade, Southampton, SO15 1ST
📢 Want to speak 📢: submit your talk proposal
Main Talk
1️⃣ Not Another LLM Talk...Practical Lessons from Building a Real-World Adverse Media Pipeline - Adam Hill
We’ve all seen the hype; LLMs are transforming workflows, revolutionising automation, and changing how we extract insights from text. But when it comes to real-world production systems, things get messy fast.
Our adverse media pipeline processes over 1 million news articles a day, scanning for reports of crimes linked to financial bad actors, money laundering, and other regulatory risks. With GenAI and LLMs, we have powerful new tools to automate entity extraction and risk detection. However, deploying these models at scale brings a whole new set of challenges:
- 🛠️ Breaking Down the Problem: Why structuring tasks into modular prompts and chaining responses is key to accuracy.
- 💰 Cost vs. Performance Trade-offs: How different prompting strategies and model choices (API-based vs. fine-tuned local models) impact cost and scalability.
- 🧐 Validation & Governance: From handling hallucinations to dealing with sensitive data while staying within regulatory frameworks.
- 🧰 Open Source & Practical Tooling: How to build reliable, cost-efficient LLM pipelines using tools in the Python ecosystem
To illustrate the real-world challenges of getting an LLM pipeline into production, we’ll introduce a cast of personas that will feel all too familiar:
- Cautious Claire – the compliance officer who doesn’t trust AI black boxes.
- Magic Mike – the sales lead who thinks LLMs can do anything.
- Just-Fine-Tune Jenny – the product manager convinced fine-tuning will fix everything.
- Reinventing Ryan – the engineer determined to build everything from scratch.
- Paranoid Pete – the security lead who fears LLMs will leak all the secrets.
Through their perspectives, we’ll explore the tensions, trade-offs, and hard-won lessons of taking an LLM-powered pipeline from a Jupyter notebook to a production-grade system. Expect practical insights through a real-world case study, and cautionary tales to help you navigate your own deployment challenges.
Who Should Attend?
This talk is for ML engineers, data scientists, software engineers, and product managers working with LLMs in production or planning to do so. Whether you’re evaluating architectures, struggling with cost control, or trying to balance compliance concerns, you’ll walk away with battle-tested strategies for building scalable, reliable, and regulation-friendly LLM pipelines.
2️⃣ TBA
⚡Lightning Talks ⚡
⚡1️⃣ TBA
⚡2️⃣ TBA
Please note:
- 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. You MUST use your initial/first name and surname on your meetup profile, otherwise, you will NOT make it on the guest list! 🚨🚨🚨
- This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.
If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No further confirmation required. You will NOT need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.
If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know so we can assign your place to someone on the waiting list.
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Code of Conduct:
This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct.
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There will be pizza & drinks, generously provided by our host, Carnival UK.
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Logistics
Doors open at 6.30 pm, talks start at 7 pm. For those who wish to continue networking and chatting we will move to a nearby pub/bar for drinks from 9 pm.
Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!
Follow us for updates and early announcements we are on Bluesky/Instagram/Threads as @pydatasoton, and find us on LinkedIn.
