About us
Southampton Microsoft Data Platform and Azure Cloud user group has been running since 2010 (originally Southampton SQL Server User Group). In that time we have had many local and international speakers present high-quality sessions on a range of SQL Server and data platform topics. We host the user group at Gamma House, Enterprise Rd, Chilworth, Southampton SO16 7NS, United Kingdom on the second Wednesday of each month.
https://goo.gl/maps/dZkH5Vb1dQ6hsoSV9
https://what3words.com/liquids.audibly.calibrate
We aim to deliver high-quality training and insight for free to the Data Platform community.
The user group has been run by John Q Martin & Steph Martin since 2012, during which time we have seen the group grow significantly with members joining and moving on.
Ten years later Mikey Bronowski took over the user group.
We are sponsored by SpectrumIT which is a local recruitment company, set up by recruitment agents who have helped us by providing the location, Pizza and an Amazon voucher to raffle off each meeting.
As a member of this meetup group, you agree to follow the terms set out in the Azure Tech Groups code of conduct here.
Upcoming events
1
Not Another LLM Talk… Practical Lessons from Building a Real-World Pipeline
Spectrum IT Recruitment, Enterprise Road, Southampton, GBThis is a place for an in-person meeting in Chilworth.
!!!!! ATTENTION
Since September, we've been having meetups at Spectrum IT's office - Gamma House, Enterprise Rd, Chilworth, Southampton SO16 7NS
https://maps.app.goo.gl/66tL8HfgFnoiQEh66Agenda
17:45 Welcome and Intros
18:00
🗣️Adam Hill, PhD
🎦Not Another LLM Talk… Practical Lessons from Building a Real-World Adverse Media Pipeline🍕pizza/networking
LLMs are magical—until they aren’t. Extracting adverse media entities might sound straightforward, but throw in hallucinations, inconsistent outputs, and skyrocketing API costs, and suddenly, that sleek prototype turns into a production nightmare.
Our adverse media pipeline monitors over 1 million articles a day, sifting through vast amounts of news to identify reports of crimes linked to financial bad actors, money laundering, and other risks. Thanks to GenAI and LLMs, we can tackle this problem in new ways—but deploying these models at scale comes with its own set of challenges: ensuring accuracy, controlling costs, and staying compliant in highly regulated industries.
In this talk, we’ll take you inside our journey to production, exploring the real-world challenges we faced through the lens of key personas: Cautious Claire, the compliance officer who doesn’t trust black-box AI; Magic Mike, the sales lead who thinks LLMs can do anything; Just-Fine-Tune Jenny, the PM convinced fine-tuning will solve everything; Reinventing Ryan, the engineer reinventing the wheel; and Paranoid Pete, the security lead fearing data leaks.
Expect practical insights, cautionary tales, and real-world lessons on making LLMs reliable, scalable, and production-ready.***
A massive thanks to our sponsor, Spectrum IT. Without them, we would not be able to host this event for free. Spectrum IT kindly provided funding for the room and pizza for in-person attendees.
***2 attendees
Past events
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