At the upcoming Civo Navigate Local Tampa (taking place Tuesday, April 16 at Armature Works), I will be giving a 15-minute lightning talk on RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation — and how you can use it to make your AI apps produce better results.
And by “better,” I mean:
Able to use data that’s newer than their last update
Incorporating information that they wouldn’t otherwise have
Using the content of a document that you provide
Able to incorporate data from a database
And yes, there will be Python code, which I’ll run live for your viewing pleasure, explain for your understanding, and give to you for your own use!
My presentation will be one of several that you’ll be able to catch at Civo Navigate Local Tampa, and best of all, you can register for the conference for the low, low, low price of…
Do you remember the first Civo Navigate conference that took place at Armature Works last February? Do you remember how much fun it was to see an upstart cloud company give interesting presentations at Armature Works, the first time it was used as a tech conference venue?
We get to do it again! Civo are returning to Tampa with Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024, a one-day conference taking place at Armature Works on Tuesday, April 16!
We’ll get to see CEO Mark Boost again…
…and the event will be hosted by Tampa Bay’s own Daniella Diaz and Suzanne Ricci (pictured below; sorry, Woz isn’t coming to this one).
In exactly one week, I’m going to giving my presentation, You’re Not Too Late to the AI Party at the Civo Navigate North America conference in Austin, Texas!
The talk, which is in a prime time slot — day one (Tuesday, February 20) just after the opening keynote (10:30 a.m.) — is for people who’ve been too busy with their actual work to get into AI and have been feeling increasing amounts of FOMO.
I’ve been spending my suddenly copious amounts of free time polishing this presentation and accompanying demos to a bright sheen. Here’s a sample from my current set of slides:
Tap to view at full size.
In the talk, I’ll cover four reasons why it’s not too late to get into AI, as well as possible ways you can get started.
I’ll also talk about:
AI’s overnight success was 70 years in the making
Are you a centaur or a minotaur, and which one is better?
AI options if you can code, and options if you can’t
AI techbros and “chaos muppets,” and the effect they have on the industry
AI ethics and how badly we need it
This talk won’t be all hand-wavey and descriptions, but will also feature demos of actual working code that you can also download, including:
ELIZA, the original 1964 chatbot, but written in present-day Python.
A basic neural network demo that shows how you implement them — perhaps the one that recognizes handwritten numbers, perhaps something a little more interesting!
“Sweater or no?” — a large language model-powered application that tells you what to wear based on your location, the weather, and the event you’re attending.
Most importantly, the talk will be fun!
I’ll be in Austin for most of next week. If you can attend Civo Navigate, I’d love to see you there! I’ll also be free and out and about in Austin that Thursday (Feb 22) for most of the day — if you’d like to meet up, let me know!
Most shows and podcasts that do a story about layoffs feature stories, advice, and survival tips and tricks from guest speakers who still have their jobs.
This show will be different. It will feature stories, advice, and survival tips and tricks from a guest speaker who’s actually laid off right now — me! I’m in the thick of it, like Jim Cantore, but for layoffs instead of hurricanes! Hopefully, the podcast equivalent of being hit by a wind-driven tree branch won’t happen to me:
Also, you don’t have to just listen. LinkedIn audio events are like Clubhouse rooms (remember Clubhouse?); you can click the “raise your hand” button and request to be “brought onstage,” where you can join the conversation. So please — join us!
It’s only day one of the new year and I just fulfilled one of my resolutions: to land a conference speaking session on AI outside my usual stomping grounds. I’m going to be a speaker at Civo Navigate North America, which takes place on February 20th and 21st in Austin, Texas!
What’s Civo Navigate, and what is Civo?
What’s Civo Navigate, you ask? Here’s a one-minute video that answers your question:
Civo is a cloud hosting provider based on Kubernetes, with a focus on developer-friendliness and wallet-friendliness. It’s a refreshing change from this state of affairs:
I met the people at Civo last year when they held Civo Navigate North America in Tampa — and not in a convention center or hotel conference rooms, but at Tampa’s big riverside food hall, Armature Works! Here’s the promo for that event:
The 2023 edition of Civo Navigate North America was a great conference with interesting talks and a warmer, more personal “feel” than a typical vendor-hosted event. Civo’s contributions continued long afterward, with their being great supporters of the Tampa Bay tech scene and this blog.
I’m looking forward to the 2024 edition in Austin?
What’s my talk about?
My talk is titled You’re not too late to the A.I. party, and it’s for people who’ve been too busy with their actual work to get into AI and have been feeling increasing amounts of FOMO.
Here’s the description of the talk, with additional AI-generated photos (that are deep in the uncanny valley):
Have you been too busy getting your actual work done to join the artificial intelligence party and feel that you’ve already missed out on the technical career opportunity of a lifetime? If you answered “yes,” this talk is for you.
The good news is that you’re not too late to the A.I. party. It’s just getting started and you arrived at a good time — perhaps even “fashionably late!” You just need someone to take you around the room and make some introductions.
To help you “work the room” as you enter the party, you’ll get an overview of artificial intelligence technologies, from the rules-based models and expert systems of A.I.’s early days to the present era of neural networks, machine learning, transformers, and large language models.
This party won’t be limited to just hand-waving small talk in the living room. We’ll go into the kitchen — the true heart of any party — and look at actual code in action. We’ll start with ELIZA, the original chatbot from the 1960s, observe a neural network, and look at an LLM-powered “What should I wear today?” app. You’ll even be able to download them for yourself!
This talk aims to be like the best parties — the ones you’re glad you were at. You’ll leave this one knowing more about AI’s underpinnings and a much better idea of the next steps in your AI journey, whether it’s catching up with AI developments, harnessing your current skills to integrate AI into your work, or even pivoting into AI development.
In my talk, I’ll discuss:
Generative vs discriminative AI
“Old School” rules-based AI vs. the “New School” version powered by neural networks, data science, and lots of data
How the internet changed AI
The intersection of data science, statistics, and AI
The paper “Attention is All You Need,” what it means, and how it changed AI forever
Large language models (LLMs)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Vector databases
This talk won’t be all hand-wavey and descriptions, but will also feature demos of actual working code that you can also download, including:
ELIZA, the original 1964 chatbot, but written in present-day Python.
A basic neural network demo that shows how you implement them — perhaps the one that recognizes handwritten numbers, perhaps something a little more interesting!
“Sweater or no?” — a large language model-powered application that tells you what to wear based on your location, the weather, and the event you’re attending.
I’ll also talk about potential “next steps” that you can take, including:
Reading material, including the funniest book about AI (for now): Janelle Shane’s You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Of course, you don’t have to wait for the talk (or even attend) to read it; you can get it now!
There Will Be Math — or, the math you’ll need to know to get into AI.
Effective Altruists, Effective Accelerationists, and how to Effectively Avoid both.
How to send the right signals to employers so they’ll know that AI is your jam!
Tampa Code Camp, a day full of presentations and workshops for coders, is happening THIS SATURDAY at Keiser University — and better still, it’s FREE to attend! In fact, they even provide a free lunch, because you can’t learn or code on an empty stomach.
This year’s Tampa Code Camp has a Halloween theme, and so does my presentation, Prototype Spook-tacular “FrankenApps” with BRAAAAINS (AI)!!!
Here’s the abstract for my presentation, which will take place from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.:
Modern AI is scary-smart, and as an aspiring mad computer scientist, you’ve probably wondered how you can write applications that harness the power of AI for your own purposes. Step into this lab, put your laptop on the slab, and learn how to take a brain (an artificial one) from a nearby graveyard (actually, from an API) and put it into your own applications!
In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to quickly prototype “FrankenApps” — apps built from bits and pieces you can find lying about the internet — and take them to the next spooky level with…BRAINS! Or, more accurately, OpenAI’s APIs, which you’ll harness to get that ChatGPT goodness into your own applications.
You’ll learn about a mad computer scientist’s favorite tools — Jupyter Notebook and Python — and use them to quickly prototype AI-powered applications, such as a weather app that recites spooky poems about the current forecast, or a Halloween costume generator. Catch this session, learn something new, and have some Halloween fun, too!
Join me and the rest of Tampa Code Camp this Saturday at Keiser University for a day of learning, coding, camaraderie, and fun! The event runs from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m..
Last year’s CyberX Tampa Bay event was a big hit, and it was only natural that there’d be another one this year. Like the first one, this year’s event was packed.
The moment I walked into the venue, I saw so many people and had so many conversations that I never got the chance to take pictures until the start of the “welcome” session in the large room:
…after which we had the choice of two breakout sessions:
Chronicles of an Entry-level Cybersecurity Professional
The Wheel of Misfortune
I went to the Wheel of Misfortune, where audience members got the chance to answer cybersecurity questions for Google swag. Anyone in the audience could volunteer to come up to the front, spin the wheel of topics and answer a question based on that topic.
Hosts Jason Allen and Jonas Kelley were pretty relaxed about audience assistance. At one point, I yelled out the acronym for remebering the 7 layers of the OSI network model — “Please Do Not Take Sausage Pizza Away!” — and no one was penalized.
The room, where every seat and available spot to stand was occupied, was lively, with people enjoying themselves. The audience participation, aided by two engaging hosts, kept the room lively until the very end.
It was then time to recognize CyberX Tampa Bay’s 2023 honoree — someone nominated by attendees as being the person who made the biggest positive impact on Tampa Bay’s cybersecurity scene. This year’s honoree was Jeremy Rasmussen!
And to close the evening, there was the keynote panel on cybersecurity myths. It featured…
Photo by Kasandra Perez. Tap to view at full size.
