Utah Java Users Group

• 6:00 : Pizza
• 6:30 : Presentation
• 7:30 : Discussion
• 8:00 : Door prizes

Applied AI in Action: Technical Insights and Implementation Lessons

Discover how AI is transforming real-world business challenges into actionable solutions through practical applications. Jacob Miller, Vice President of Data Science at Pattern, will share insights and lessons from his journey integrating AI into business environments. With a background in analytics, economics, and strategic project management, Jacob brings a wealth of expertise in harnessing AI for data-driven decision-making and innovation.

• 6pm Pizza
• 6:30 : Intro/Announcements
• 6:35 : Presentation
• 8:00 : Door prizes

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Houston.

He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.

Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at https://www.agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at [email protected] or on twitter at @venkat_s.

Specialties: Internationally recognized in the area of software development practices, agile methods, and programming languages.

• 6pm Pizza
• 6:30 : Intro/Announcements
• 6:35 : Presentation
• 8:00 : Door prizes

Love, Infatuation, and Programming Languages
They say that tools shape their users. I can believe that: looking back at 50 years of programming, I can see how a number of languages have both changed the way I think about programming and, in a couple of cases, totally changed my life. But it's more than a personal story. Back when everything was new, people were less set in their ways, and ideas were wilder. Many of these old tools have a lot to teach us today.
And, how about you? If your tools shape how you think, what are you doing to maximize what you get out of them? Let's find out :)

Dave Thomas is a programmer. He has also written some books, helped create a manifesto, and has corrupted minds at conferences and user groups around the world.

• 6pm Pizza
• 6:30-7:45 Presentation
• 7:45-8:00 Group Discussion / Q&A
• 8:00 Door prizes

As the newness and shock of the surface results of large language models (LLMs) wore off, we quickly saw the horrifying and hilarious consequences of hallucinations in the generated content space. While amusing, the idea of exposing your brand to the kind of damage that such anomalies would expose you to is going to be a major impediment to adoption.
While the large tech companies do not know yet how to stop these hallucinations from happening, new techniques have emerged to help address the problem. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) models are gaining traction as a way of shaping the generated content based upon your understanding of a domain.
In this talk, I will provide a high level explanation of where these hallucinations come from and how RAG models will assist your attempts to roll LLMs into production more safely.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.