Davis Square LLM Meetup

• Who: People who build, develop and apply LLMs or wish to learn more about them
• When: 6:15-8:15pm Tuesday, January 23, 2024; doors open at 5:30pm
• Where: BasisTech, 1070 Broadway, Somerville, MA 02144 (directions) is a 10 minute walk from the Davis Sq. T station
• What: Two speakers followed by Q&A. Food and drinks will be served.

Sheamus McGovern is the founder of ODSC (The Open Data Science Conference), hosting major AI conferences in cities like Boston, San Francisco, and London. He also serves as a Venture Partner and Head of AI at Cortical Ventures, an investment fund with a primary focus on AI. As a software architect, data engineer, and AI enthusiast, Sheamus began his career in finance, working for various financial institutions and quantitative hedge funds. Over the past decade, he has consulted with numerous companies and startups, developing cutting-edge, data-driven applications in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and eCommerce.His academic credentials include degrees from Northeastern University, Boston University, Harvard University, and a Certificate in Quantitative Finance (CQF).

Chris Biow has over 30 years background as a technologist working in text retrieval, databases, and machine learning. He holds a BS in mathematics from the US Naval Academy and an MS in computer science from the University of Maryland. He served with the US Navy as an F-14 Tomcat RIO (Radar Intercept Officer). Upon leaving active duty with the Navy, Chris founded a sales-enablement software company and then worked delivering public sector and commercial solutions with search and database software at Verity, Autonomy, as Federal CTO at MarkLogic, and at MongoDB. He specialized in problematically large textual data problems and was the first to stand up a petabyte database on MongoDB. He has been a speaker at AWS Re:Invent, NoSQL Now, Text Analytics, and Smart Data conferences. He most recently led BasisTech’s Rosette AI-based text analytics software through a period of fast growth, leading to an acquisition by Veritas Capital in December 2022 and a merger with Babel Street Ltd. He is now back with BasisTech as an Entrepreneur in Residence.

As a technologist, Chris has always believed that those applying technologies to business problems should strive to maintain an understanding of their technologies down to the level of the mathematical operation, machine register state, and cache chain.

BasisTech hosts this in-person meetup for people interested in connecting to learn more about LLMs together. Whether you are an entrepreneur, engineer, or data scientist working to build new models, better solve old problems or tackle new ideas, we invite you to join us.

Each session will feature talks by people with expertise in an area of LLM or sharing something interesting they are doing with LLMs. There will be ample time for Q&A and getting to know each other over food and drinks.