Meetup
Introduction
We organise events with industry partners, workshops and hands-on coding sessions on an irregular basis on any of the ZHAW campuses.
Hands-On-Workshop on the Azure OpenAI-API
When: 30.1.2025, 13:00-18:00
Where: ZHAW Campus Zürich Lagerstrasse ZL O6.10
Organiser: Manuel Dömer
Speakers: Nicolas Rehder (Allgeier Schweiz) and Alex Dean (Unit8)
Description: This workshop provides an invaluable opportunity for individuals looking to improve their workflows by strategically integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities through Large Language Models (LLMs) provided by Microsoft Azure into their data infrastructure.
Attendees will learn how to effectively use the Azure OpenAI API with Python. Key topics such as model improvement techniques like prompt engineering, RAG, and fine-tuning will also be covered.
The skills acquired in this workshop are transferable to the OpenAI API.
Participants will dive into a practical use case to combat food waste by creating personalized recipe suggestions using the Azure OpenAI API.
Hands-On Workshop: Leveraging Dynamic Programming for Reinforcement Learning
When: 12.12.2024, 18:00-20:00
Where: ZHAW Campus Winterthur Technikumstrasse(PDF 2,1 MB) TN O1.46
Organiser: Manuel Dömer
Speaker: Pavel Sulimov
Description: Reinforcement learning (RL) first gained widespread attention when AlphaGo defeated 9-dan Go master Lee Sedol in 2016. After a period of relative quiet, RL is experiencing a resurgence, driven by advancements such as RL with human feedback for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and diffusion-pre-trained RL models in robotics, which are showing significant improvements.
To stay ahead of this trend and deepen our understanding of RL algorithms, it's essential to revisit their foundation: dynamic programming (DP). Mastery of DP not only enhances your grasp of RL but also demonstrates strong general programming skills, a common topic in technical interviews.
Join us for an evening dedicated to DP, where we'll explore the theory, tackle quizzes, and solve coding challenges from Leetcode and Advent of Code (because Christmas is coming).
Summary & Key Outcomes of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024
When: 10.10.2024, 18:00-20:00
Where: ZHAW Campus Winterthur Technikumstrasse(PDF 2,1 MB) TS O1.13
Organiser: Manuel Dömer
Speaker: Pavel Sulimov
Title: Summary & Key Outcomes of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024
Description: Regardless of your specific area of interest within ML - be it natural language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), reinforcement learning (RL), diffusion models, applied or theoretical frameworks - you are sure to find valuable insights and concise summaries of novel developments during our recap session. We will focus on
- a tutorial on the physics of large language models (LLMs) which emerged as one of the most talked-about sessions,
- reinforcement learning from human feedback
- superalignment,
- supervised fine-tuning and reward/RL for LLMs
- and scalable recommender systems
Quantum Machine Learning: The next big thing after Large Deep Learning models?
When: 23.5.2024, 17:45-20:00
Where: ZHAW Campus Winterthur Technikumstrasse(PDF 2,1 MB) TN O1.46
Organiser: Manuel Dömer
Organiser: Pavel Sulminov
Title: Quantum Machine Learning: The next big thing after Large Deep Learning models?
Description: The conceptual input will provide answers to what types of machine learning problem could be solved by quantum algorithms faster and/or with better accuracy and how a "quantum version" of a "classical" algorithm can be developed. In the workshop, we will dive deeper into the basics of quantum computation, how quantum models differ architecturally from classical ones, when it makes sense to switch to quantum models, and how ZHAW students and employees can construct their first ansatz and run experiments on IBM quantum computers with 100+ quantum bits.
Registration: Please reserve your spot here