As the year winds down and the holiday spirits ramp up, we invite you to the most electrifying AI meetup (end-of-year edition). Instead of our usual scheduled talks, we will throw the most exciting holiday bash for people who build AI!

Join AI developers, ML engineers, Data scientists and practitioners to celebrate all your hard work this year.

Agenda:
* 5:00pm: Checkin, Snack and Networking
* 5:45pm: Welcome/Community update
* 6:00pm: Tech Talks and Q&A
* 7:30pm: Open Discussion, AI community demo and networking
* 8:00pm: Closing

Tech Talk 1: LLM-powered applications: One year after ChatGPT
Speaker: Dimitrios Tanoglidis @Walgreens
Abstract: This talk will serve as an overview of the state-of-the-art in LLM-powered application development, one year after the release of ChatGPT. Topics that we will discuss: Proprietary vs open source LLMs. Practical use case examples of LLMs. Efficient fine-tuning of LLMs. Vector Databases and retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG). LLM agents. Prototyping and deploying LLM applications. Time permitting, we will show how you can easily create a small app and easily deploy it on Hugging Face!

Tech Talk 2: GenerativeAI using Amazon Bedrock
Speaker: Swagat Kulkarni, Bryan Henderson @AWS
Abstract: This talk will discuss Amazon Bedrock and how it enables organizations get started with their GenAI use cases securely with large selection of foundation models and relevant tools such as Agents for Bedrock and Knowledge base

Tech Talk 3: A Look at GenAI Apps from the Cloud and DB Infrastructural Angle
Speaker: Mary Grygleski @DataStax and David Giard @Microsoft
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) has taken the world by storm since the debut of ChatGPT 3.5 a year ago. There are many technical layers to this fascinating and complex topic area within the AI/ML space. Let us take a look at how GenAI is leveraging the Cloud and the Vector DB as indispensable tools for its infrastructural layer. We will be showing you how to use DataStax managed Astra DB Vector on Azure.

Topics/Speakers:
Stay tuned as we are updating speakers and schedules. If you have a keen interest in speaking, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: Submit Topics

Startup Showcase:
We have 5~10 demo desks available for the community showcases and ~5 minutes quick demo on the stage. We will have judges and attendees vote for projects, with 3 amazing awards (best of innovation, best of technology, popular vote). You are invited to apply here Community Showcase

Venue:
IBM Conference Center (6th floor), 71 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL

Sponsors:
We are actively seeking sponsors to support AI developers community.  Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food, or cash sponsorship. Sponsors will have the chance to speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, and gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 10,000+ local or 300K+ developers worldwide.

Community on Slack
- Event chat: chat and connect with speakers and attendees
- Sharing blogs, events, job openings, projects collaborations
Join Slack (browse/search and join #chicago channel)