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
DeepSeek R1: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/blob/main/DeepSeek_R1.pdf
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
6/2/25: Multimodal models
6/9/25: Voice models
6/30/25: Finetuning
7/7/25: Applications of AI in medicine, healthcare, agriculture, and environmental stewardship
7/14/25: Appropriate Computing Certificate design
8/19/25: Planning meeting
9/5/25: AI development trajectories
9/12/25: What is appropriate computing?
9/19/25: No meeting
9/26/25: AI in education
10/3/25: AI in medicine (slides)
10/10/25: AI Policy and Public Schools: Beyond Fear & Hype
10/17/27: What is Neuromorphic Computing?