[NYC AI Event Pick] | March 2025

And Our Event Recap!

Mar 03, 2025

💡 Editor's Note: This month, we're diving into the intersection of AI with healthcare, materials science, and human-centered design. With exciting talks from institutions like MIT and Cornell, there's something for everyone in the AI community. Our focus continues to be on practical applications that create real impact. The highlight of February was our RAG workshop with Steven Bonilla from Microsoft—details below for those who missed it. Remember, our subscribers get first access to all upcoming event invitations!

🌟 Featured Events

Human-centered AI Beyond Human-in-the-Loop with Prof. Dr. Przegalińska (Mar 20)
AI for Social Good Innovative Applications at NYU with Prof. Dr. Ruopeng (Mar 4)

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📅 Key Events This Month

Featured Event: Human-centered AI

Human-centered AI: Why a Human in the Loop Is Not Enough
- Date: March 20, 12:00 PM
- Speaker: Aleksandra Przegalińska
- Focus: Moving beyond standard frameworks toward transformative human-AI partnerships
- Register Here

Technical Focus: AI Community NYC Meetup

AI Tinkerers NYC Meetup - March 2025
- Date: March 4, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
- Location: NYC (In-person, details upon registration)
- Features: LLM demos, sponsor showcases (SignalFire, Comet)
- Register Here
NYC AI Users - AI Talks, Demo & Social
- Date: March 25, 7:30 PM - 10:30 PM
- Location: NYC (In-person, details upon registration)
- Features: Fine Tuning Gen AI and ML & LLMs
- Register Here

Special Event: AI for Social Good

AI for Social Good
- Date: March 4, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
- Speaker: Dr. Ruopeng An (NYU)
- Topic: Projects addressing COVID-19 disinformation, tracking public sentiment, and more
- Register Here

📆 Additional Events

[Nexus Recap] RAG: Building Real-World AI Applications

Now, if you would like to learn more about the event you can find the recording, slides, and relevant resources below!

Presentation Slides, Recordings, and References: http://tinyurl.com/pmag-drive

Access Instructions: Simply subscribe and you will automatically gain access in an hour.

Last Friday, we had the privilege of hosting Steven Bonilla, an LLM Engineer from Microsoft, who gave us an amazing presentation on industrial grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in chatbot applications for financial analysts!

Steven walked us through the basic concepts and architecture of a RAG system (our last post also briefly touched on this topic) , as well as key components used in the practical designs such as:

Contextual Query Processing: Creating awareness of conversation history
Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identifying key information for retrieval
Retriever Router: Deciding which data sources to query
Scaling Techniques: Batching calls and using appropriate model complexity

One challenge presented was similarity calculation between query and contexts - you would not believe how many of these implementations just uses simple vector retrieval. Alas, there are more solutions on the horizon for better and more accurate ways to find relevant contexts (i.e Gutiérrez, et al., 2025).

In short, these are the real world considerations when leveraging RAG in your products - we cannot always operate on infinite budget (seriously, a big concern) and have to use less powerful models to deal with our problems. Yet,

"There's always a way - if you're committed." - Tony Robbins.

Technical Deep Dive

For those interested in exploring RAG further, check out these resources:

I have put more resources in the shared drive, feel free to check it out (simply subscribe)!

Again, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to Steven for sharing his expertise and to all who attended!!

Curated with 💙 for the NYC AI community

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