Teaching assistant for LSU's applied LLM systems course
Invited back to the course where FarmSmart began, Raby serves as teaching assistant for its second cohort, guiding a team building an AI "Virtual Expert" for BASF.
A semester after taking the course in its first year, Raby was invited back by Roy Haggerty, Henry Hays and James Ghawaly to serve as teaching assistant for HNRS 3035, the Ogden Honors College course on developing large language model systems, in spring 2024.
The second cohort built on the lessons of the first. After covering the foundations of LLMs (agents, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation), students formed project teams, each partnered with an industry sponsor: BASF, The Advocate and Our Lady of the Lake.The Advocate covered the program's industry partnerships in March 2024.
Raby guided the BASF team as it built a "Virtual Expert": an AI system that gives employees, especially new ones, direct access to the company's policies and institutional knowledge, and preserves the know-how of long-serving engineers before they retire. The final product turned large bodies of patent information into accessible intelligence for engineers and lawyers alike.
Working through the material a second time showed how far the technology had moved in a few months, and how to help a team avoid the pitfalls of building these systems.
