Appropriate Computing Discussion Group

Are you interested in building and maintaining AI systems that benefit people and the planet?  

Please join us at our weekly "Appropriate Computing" reading and discussion group.  

We'll alternate between discussions of the technical foundations of state-of-the-art AI systems and explorations of ideas from the Appropriate Technology movement.

Readings: 

-AI Systems: https://www.latent.space/p/2025-papers

-Appropriate Technology: Small is Beautiful (Fritz Schumacher) 

Location: NHE 106

Time: Monday 12-1 pm

Discussion topics:

2/17/25: Introduction and plan for remainder of term

2/24/25: First two chapters of Small is Beautiful, https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/

3/3/25: Frontier LLMS

1.  GPT4: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774

2.  DeepSeek R1: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/DeepSeek_R1.pdf

3.  BERT:  https://huggingface.co/blog/modernbert, https://www.answer.ai/posts/colbert-pooling.html

3/10/25: Fritz Schumacher Documentary and Appropedia

3/17/25: Spring Break

3/24/25:  Slice of AI and Pie talk by Alana Chin

3/31/25: Cesar Chavez Day

4/7/25: Benchmarks

4/14/25: Prompting, ICL & Chain of Thought

4/21/25: Retrieval Augmented Generation

4/28/25: Agents

5/05/25: Code Generation

5/12/25: Diffusion

5/19/25: Vision

5/26/25: Memorial Day