Abstract
What is an unconference?
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions. A professional facilitator is also there to help keep the discussion moving forward, but where it goes is up to the participants.
It's a facilitated peer group that avoids the hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as a top-down organization. Only the broad themes are predetermined. Everything else is just space for attendees to sound off ideas together, relate to shared challenges and rewards, and identify new ideas and goals.
Our unconference sessions have been based on the Open Space Technology and Lean Coffee format since 2006.
Why are we doing unconference sessions?
We have designed QCon for senior software practitioners. That role comes with demanding challenges and complex problems.
Connecting with your peers in a structured environment allows you to:
- Broaden your perspective with the benefit of the experience of others.
- Challenge how you've been doing things by breaking out of your bubble.
- Learn from peers who have already overcome the challenges you're facing now.
- Benchmark your solutions against other teams and organizations.
- Get real-world perspectives on challenges that might be too novel or specific to find solutions in books or presentations.
- Validate your technical roadmap with real-world research.
- Connect with others like you and build relationships that go beyond the event.
QCon San Francisco 2023 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Modern ML: GenAI, Trust, & Path2Prod Hosted by Hien Luu AI/ML Leader, Advisor, Speaker, and AuthorFrom the same track
Tuesday 3 October
10:35 Seacliff ABC Session AI/ML Chronon - Airbnb’s End-to-End Feature Platform Nikhil Simha Author of "Chronon Feature Platform", Previously Built Stream Processing Infra @Meta and NLP Systems @Amazon & @Walmartlabs ML Models typically use upwards of 100 features to generate a single prediction. As a result, there is an explosion in the number of data pipelines and high request fanout during prediction. 11:45 Seacliff ABC Session AI/ML Defensible Moats: Unlocking Enterprise Value with Large Language Models Nischal HP Vice President of Data Science @Scoutbee, Decade of Experience Building Enterprise AI Building LLM-powered applications using APIs alone poses significant challenges for enterprises. These challenges include data fragmentation, the absence of a shared business vocabulary, privacy concerns regarding data, and diverse objectives among data and ML users. 13:35 Ballroom A Session Distributed Computing Modern Compute Stack for Scaling Large AI/ML/LLM Workloads Jules Damji Lead Developer Advocate @Anyscale, MLflow Contributor, and Co-Author of "Learning Spark" Advanced machine learning (ML) models, particularly large language models (LLMs), require scaling beyond a single machine. 14:45 Pacific DEKJ Session AI/ML Generative Search: Practical Advice for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Sam Partee Principal Engineer @Redis In this presentation, we will delve into the world of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and its significance for Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT4. With the rapid evolution of data, LLMs face the challenge of staying up-to-date and contextually relevant. 15:55 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Modern ML What is an unconference? An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions. 17:05 Ballroom BC Session AI/ML Building Guardrails for Enterprise AI Applications W/ LLMs Shreya Rajpal Founder @Guardrails AI, Experienced ML Practitioner with a Decade of Experience in ML Research, Applications and Infrastructure Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have revolutionized AI applications, offering unprecedented potential for complex real-world scenarios. However, fully harnessing this potential comes with unique challenges such as model brittleness and the need for consistent, accurate outputs.