Mastering the Power of Language to Unlock AI’s Potential

Course Overview

Starting on Sunday, February 2nd, 2025

In the ever-evolving field of artificial intelligence, mastering the nuances of prompt engineering is essential for professionals aiming to harness the full potential of generative AI. This 2-month course on in Prompt Engineering is meticulously designed for engineers who are keen to deepen their expertise and apply advanced prompt engineering techniques in an enterprise setting.

This course emphasizes a hands-on approach, with extensive lab exercises, practical projects, quizzes, and case studies.

Learning Outcome

You will gain practical experience in building generative AI applications.  You will also engage with cutting-edge research papers to stay abreast of recent advancements in the field.

Prerequisites

PythonLLM

Schedule

START DATE SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2nd, 2025
Duration 8 weeks
Session days Every Sunday
Session timing 11 AM PST to Evening
Session Type In-person / Remote
Morning sessions Theory / Paper Readings
Evening sessions Lab / Presentation

Skills you will learn

Prompting techniques, programmatic prompting, monitoring and securing prompts

Syllabus Details

 

prompt_engineering_timeline

This syllabus provides a structured pathway to mastering the nuances of prompt engineering. From foundational concepts and types of prompting to advanced programmatic automation and observability techniques, this course covers a wide spectrum of topics that cater to both beginners and experienced AI practitioners. Each section is tailored to deepen your knowledge, offering practical insights, real-world case studies, and hands-on demonstrations.

This section ensures that everyone, regardless of their technical background or level of experience, feels comfortable engaging with LLMs. By demystifying the underlying infrastructure and deployment methods, participants will gain the confidence to use and interact with LLMs effectively. This foundation is crucial for setting the stage for more advanced topics in prompt engineering, enabling learners to appreciate the full potential of LLMs while understanding their practical deployment in diverse contexts

LLM Inference Endpoints and Frameworks:
Understand the infrastructure supporting large language models (LLMs) and the frameworks used for deploying them in real-world applications. This will cover cloud-based solutions, API endpoints, and efficient ways to integrate LLMs into various services.

You will be equipped with the foundational knowledge necessary for understanding the art of prompt design, laying the groundwork for advanced techniques that allow you to better guide the AI to produce the desired output.

Overview of Prompting:
A deep dive into the basics of prompting, including the different types of prompts (text, visual, audio, video) and how they can be used to interact with AI models. Learn the strategies for crafting effective prompts.

Prompting as Control Flow:
Explore how to use prompts to guide the sequence of AI operations. You will learn techniques for controlling the behavior and flow of a model’s output based on different types of input.

 

 

Dive into advanced techniques for prompting, addressing both the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. By the end of this segment, you’ll have the tools to push the boundaries of what these models can achieve.

Limitations of LLMs and Manual Prompting:
Understand the inherent limitations of LLMs and how manual prompting can be optimized to mitigate these limitations. This includes handling common challenges such as bias, lack of context, and model unpredictability.

COSTAR and Other Prompting Techniques:
Learn about COSTAR and other state-of-the-art prompting techniques. Discover how these methods allow you to extract more nuanced responses from LLMs for complex tasks.

These practical examples will showcase how prompt engineering can be applied across different domains, helping you connect theory with real-world usage. You’ll understand how to make the most of prompting in diverse contexts

Case Studies & Domain Applications:
Explore real-world applications of prompt engineering across various industries such as healthcare, finance, and entertainment. Through case studies, see how companies are leveraging advanced prompting techniques to solve complex problems

Prompting in Structured Output Generation:
Learn how to design prompts that generate structured outputs, such as tables, JSON data, or code, to ensure your AI systems respond in useful and predictable formats.

Specialized techniques such as function-based prompting and constrained sampling enable you to harness advanced functionality and precision in your AI responses. This section will introduce you to cutting-edge tools for more targeted prompt engineering.

Function Call-based Prompting (Instructor-Led):
Understand how to use function calls to structure prompts dynamically. Learn how this technique allows you to use external functions to guide the model’s behavior during prompt execution.

Constrained Sampling:
Explore methods for constrained sampling that help refine your prompts, ensuring the AI produces only the most relevant responses.

Constrained Sampling: Microsoft Guidance:
Learn about Microsoft’s approach to constrained sampling, a method for optimizing and controlling the outputs of LLMs in specific applications.

This section focuses on automation techniques that will allow you to scale your prompting process and integrate new tools for streamlined, programmatic prompt creation.

Programmatic Prompting and Automation:
Learn how to automate the prompt generation process using programming techniques, saving time and improving efficiency in deploying prompts at scale.

Programmatic Prompting: DSPy:
Explore DSPy, a tool designed to help automate and optimize the prompting process. Learn how to integrate it into your workflow to streamline prompt development.

Programmatic Prompting: SAMMO:
Discover SAMMO, an advanced framework that allows for deep automation in the prompt generation process, enhancing your ability to work with large-scale systems.

Learn how to monitor, evaluate, and secure your prompts in production environments. This is a critical part of working with AI systems at scale, ensuring your work is both effective and safe.

Prompt Monitoring:
Understand techniques for monitoring the effectiveness of your prompts in real-time. Learn how to observe AI performance and adjust prompts accordingly to optimize results.

LLM Observability:
Delve into tools like Arize Phoenix, LogFire, and LangFuse to monitor the performance of LLMs. These tools help ensure that your models are running efficiently, securely, and reliably.

Prompt Security:
Explore methods for securing prompt engineering processes, ensuring that data integrity, privacy, and model safety are maintained while interacting with AI systems.

This section explores emerging trends and innovative techniques that will help you stay at the forefront of the field. By learning about synthetic data and advanced methods like TextGrad, you’ll be prepared for the next wave of prompt engineering.

Synthetic Data Generation:
Discover how to generate synthetic data for testing and optimizing prompts. Learn how this can help in situations where real data is scarce or sensitive.

TextGrad: Advanced Techniques for Secure Prompt Engineering:
Learn about the latest techniques, including TextGrad, for advancing prompt engineering in a secure and scalable way, ensuring that your prompts can handle a wide range of tasks without compromising on accuracy or security.

The teaching faculty for this course comprises the instructor, a supportive staff of teaching assistants, and a course coordinator. Together, they facilitate learning through close guidance and 1-1 sessions when needed.

Teaching Faculty

Asif Qamar

Chief Scientist and Educator

Background

Over more than three decades, Asif’s career has spanned two parallel tracks: as a deeply technical architect & vice president and as a passionate educator. While he primarily spends his time technically leading research and development efforts, he finds expression for his love of teaching in the courses he offers. Through this, he aims to mentor and cultivate the next generation of great AI leaders, engineers, data scientists & technical craftsmen.

Educator

He has also been an educator, teaching various subjects in AI/machine learning, computer science, and Physics for the last 32 years. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley extension, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and Syracuse University. He has also given a large number of courses, seminars, and talks at technical workplaces. He has been honored with various excellence in teaching awards in universities and technical workplaces.

Chandar Lakshminarayan

Head of AI Engineering

Background

A career spanning 25+ years in fundamental and applied research, application development and maintenance, service delivery management and product development. Passionate about building products that leverage AI/ML. This has been the focus of his work for the last decade. He also has a background in computer vision for industry manufacturing, where he innovated many novel algorithms for high precision measurements of engineering components. Furthermore, he has done innovative algorithmic work in robotics, motion control and CNC.

Educator

He has also been an educator, teaching various subjects in AI/machine learning, computer science, and Physics for the last decade.


Teaching Assistants

Our teaching assistants will guide you through your labs and projects. Whenever you need help or clarification, contact them on the SupportVectors Discord server or set up a Zoom meeting.

Kate Amon

Univ. of California, Berkeley

Kayalvizhi T

Indira Gandhi National Univ

Ravi Sati

Kalasalingam Univ.

Harini Datla

Indian Statistical Institute

Kunal Lall

Univ. of Illinois, Chicago

In-Person vs Remote Participation

Participants local to Silicon Valley are encouraged to attend in person at SupportVectors so that they can form strong learning teams and participate in the dynamic learning community. However, it is equally possible to attend all the sessions remotely. The workshops are designed in such a manner as to ensure that remote participants are equally a part of the learning experience.
Each session is live over zoom, and very interactive. A group of teaching assistants will monitor the stream of questions from students, and moderate their participation in the live discussions with other students and the professor during the sessions. Each session is also live broadcast over a dedicated private YouTube link, so that participants may choose to participate live on their TV.
Through the dedicated course portal, the participants will find a wealth of educational resources associated with the subject and the workshop, including recordings of all the sessions, the solutions to the labs and quizzes, etc.

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