Comprising of presentations and interactive workshops this free, one day introduction to the fundamentals of AI focuses upon the development and use of Large Language Models (LLM's). Led by professionals in the field of Computing Science and Education, the sessions are designed to facilitate impactful discussions between participants. The aim of this mini-conference is to raise levels of participant awareness and understanding of the potential for LLM's in classroom teaching and learning and the development of school policy.
Schedule:
Welcome & Introduction
Seminar 1: Student pathways to Computer Science at UEA
Workshop 1: LLM Fundamentals – from Bag of Words to GPT
Most of us are using Generative AI tools in one form or another on a daily basis. But how does it work? This workshop will explain foundational concepts from the recent developments in AI that make this technology work.
Outcomes
• Understand what makes the "magic" of GPT and Large Language Models (LLMs) possible via foundational concepts of word embeddings and the transformer architecture.
• Get an intuition of word embeddings as numbers projected in vector space.
• Distinguish components of the self-attention mechanism in transformer models.
• Adjust hyperparameters of GPT models to control output randomness.
• Understand how geometric similarity approaches can be used to represent similarity between words.
Workshop 2: Building a local LLM - Ollama open source code is one of the easiest way to run open-weight language models (LLMs) locally on your computer. It handles downloading, running, and managing models with simple commands. Everything runs on your laptop — no API keys, no usage limits, and your data never leaves your machine.
Outcomes
• Getting Started with Ollama
• Text Classification for Research
• LLM-as-Judge: Evaluating Text Quality
• Batch Processing Research Data
• Best Practices and Tips
Seminar 2: Round table discussion: Use of LLM's in teaching.
• How can LLM’s support teaching and learning?
• What do institutions school leaders to know when developing LLM policies for schools?
• Which is the best option – the pros and cons of building your own LLM.
- Workshops
- Seminars
- Lectures