My LinkedIn Profile | My UC Berkeley Faculty Page
Free, Non-commercial, No sales pitches.
Teens, Adults, Seniors.
I've been working in AI since the 1980s and teach online graduate courses for UC Berkeley remotely while based in Euless, Texas. Giving free AI workshops is a passion project for me. I am offering free, face-to-face AI workshops to empower folks to truly understand and use AI.
If you are a high school teacher in the Dallas / Fort Worth area and would like me to present a workshop at your school, please reach out to me on LinkedIn above.
If you can provide a low or no cost space in the Dallas / Fort Worth area for me to host a workshop open to the general public, I would be extremely grateful. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn above.
Join my hands-on 2-hour workshop and discover how to get dramatically better results from popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Claude. I'll start with the basics including what AI actually is, the philosophy behind it, and important topics like dangers, ethics, and safety. Then I'll cover practical prompting techniques, understanding how AI works, avoiding common pitfalls like hallucinations and bias, and seeing real-world examples like writing resumes, planning travel, reviewing documents, creative projects, etc. I'll even help you set up free AI accounts 30 minutes before the workshop starts. Bring your phone, tablet, or laptop and leave with practical skills, free course materials, and the confidence to use AI effectively and responsibly in your everyday life.
Save the Date: Next workshop planned for Saturday, June 20th in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas. Will update as soon as time is confirmed.
Tentative Fall Dates: Libraries in the Hurst and Bedford areas.
This is a full-day, hands-on workshop focused on one of the hottest and most exciting areas of AI right now: creating your own custom AI Large Language Model (LLM). For example, ChatGPT is an LLM. Just a couple of years ago, building a customized LLM was out of reach for most people. Known as LLM Engineering, this field has become dramatically more accessible thanks to recent advances in both hardware and software.
While pretraining an LLM still costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, customizing pretrained models is now within reach for individuals. In this workshop, you will learn how to build your own private custom AI assistant. We will start by turning your own documents into a custom knowledge base using vector embeddings and creating a vector database for intelligent semantic search. You will then download a powerful pretrained model and customize it using several advanced techniques, including Continued Pretraining (CPT), [unsupervised] Fine-Tuning (FT), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA, QLoRA, DoRA, etc.), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), In-Context Learning (ICL), and more. We will compare how each technique performs so you can understand their strengths and trade-offs.
While some basic comfort with running and lightly modifying code is helpful, the workshop is designed to be approachable. All necessary scripts and tools will be provided, and many steps now feature user-friendly interfaces or AI-assisted support. You will need to have a free Google account to run Google Colab, and you will also need to bring a laptop that can run the Google Chrome Browser.
Currently in Development: Will update as it nears completion and dates and locations are confirmed.
As AI adoption accelerates, companies face increasing pressure to ensure unbiased decision-making, fairness, privacy, ethics, transparency, trust, and compliance. This cutting-edge course explores how Blockchain provides an immutable record of model training provenance, ensuring auditability and accountability, while Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) enable privacy-preserving verification of training data. Additionally, the course covers leveraging these methods to prove an AI model is unbiased, ensuring fair and ethical AI systems. With regulatory scrutiny on the rise, mastering these technologies is critical for enterprises seeking compliant AI systems. Includes hands-on Python programming labs using Jupyter Notebooks.
Using AI to generate Quantum Computing circuits, and in turn, using generated Quantum Computing circuits to speed up AI algorithms.
Blockchain, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Homomorphic, Post Quantum, Quantum.
I've developed a proposed syllabus for a university or college freshman level AI Literacy course designed to be accessible to students from all majors. The only prerequisites are high school Algebra II and basic computer literacy. The course includes optional programming labs, which would require at least one semester of high school level Python programming. The goal is to provide a broad, foundational understanding of AI concepts without requiring a deep technical background, making it approachable for students with diverse academic interests.
I am a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Master's Program in Data Science and the Master's Program in Cybersecurity. This website is my personal platform, and all content reflects my own views and opinions, which are not necessarily those of UC Berkeley.