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College of Technology Holds First Graduate Students Coffee Hour and Doctoral Colloquium

November 14, 2023
Jason Wyatt stands behind a computer and gives a talk. There is a blue Powerpoint slide with white text projected on the screen behind them.
Jason Wyatt, a Doctor of Technology student, presented his preliminary doctoral research at the first COT Graduate Student Coffee Hour and Doctoral Colloquium.

College of Technology (COT) Graduate Studies organized the first COT Graduate Students Coffee Hour and Doctoral Colloquium on Nov 3, 2023. COT faculty, doctoral students and master’s graduate students came together to participate in the event.

Mr. Jason Wyatt presented his preliminary doctoral research titled “Are 10000 GPUs required to train an LLM (Large Language Model)?”. Ricardo Calix, Associate Professor of Computer Information Technology and Jason’s primary doctoral advisor, introduced Mr. Jason Wyatt and his research at the beginning of the event.

Currently, LLMs (large language models) are at the forefront of software technology. It is also well known that data is king. Therefore, this research will focus on generating a transformer model to perform smart training. This will be accomplished by combining concepts from current techniques such as data cleaning, anomaly detection, curriculum and active learning, and core-set selection.

Students and faculty sit in a classroom

Jason emphasized, “Using this smart trainer to create compact models, with faster inference times, that are deployable to edge devices for different ML applications will allow me to research testing these deployed models’ viability on different downstream tasks.”

PNW’s new Doctor of Technology program is based on applied research, the DTech focuses on problems that industry encounters in practice… problems for which a solution is unknown and that require a higher level of knowledge and innovation. Jason said, “I am thankful Purdue Northwest has started the DTech program and I am looking forward to all of the research ahead.”