Making AI for Complete Beginners

Delivered by: Shaun Ring and Paula Del Castillo Vivero

Curious about how large language models (LLMs) can be adapted for your own research or teaching? Drawing on Hugging Face resources, this workshop demystifies concepts like training, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, low-rank adaption (LoRA) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), providing a beginner-friendly introduction for participants from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. We'll mainly focus on RAG, with other approaches provided as context. You’ll learn key concepts without heavy coding or mathematics. Through guided demonstrations and discussion, we’ll examine both practical applications, and also touch on questions of ethics and sustainability – and to dig deeper, we highly recommend the Beyond Responsible AI workshop as a follow-up.

The workshop is open to Sussex researchers at all levels - please register using your @sussex.ac.uk email address. Refreshments will be provided.

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This workshop is part of The Digital Methods Accelerator (DMA) programme 2025-26, a series of in-person workshops aimed at Social Sciences and Humanities researchers at all levels wanting to explore and skill up on digital methods for their research.