IEEE Region 5

This is a volunteer-led, one-on-one session offered to support your professional and personal growth. Whether you're exploring career direction, enhancing your technical skills, or developing soft skills like communication, leadership, and time management — this session is designed around your unique goals. We’ll also discuss how IEEE resources, communities, and volunteering opportunities can support your development journey — from technical learning to building a strong professional network. These sessions are informal, private, and tailored to your interests. Hosted by an IEEE volunteer as part of our commitment to mentoring and professional development within the technical community. Note: Limited availability. Registration is required. Please do not forward this link publicly. Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/483987

Join IEEE as we directly engage with local congressional staff to address our engineering issues through IEEE-USA Congressional Outreach Program (ICOP). This unique opportunity provides a platform for all Young Professionals to voice their concerns or key ideas. Through a series of congressional meetings with your representative staff members, you have an opportunity in policy discussions and build stronger partnerships as you move forward in your career. This opportunity is geared towards our young professionals who are currently attending or have graduated from university within the last 15 years. IEEE membership is required. If you’re willing to make a difference, or have any further questions, contact the current YP chair, (mailto:[email protected]?subject=Expression%20of%20Interest%20-%20ICOP%20) or any of our LSS/IEEE officers ASAP. Congressional Staff Offices (multiple), Austin, Texas, United States

Welcome to Our Cybersecurity Workshop We are excited to invite you to our Cybersecurity Workshop, designed for IT professionals and related fields. This intensive five-day program, sponsored by Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security and FEMA, aims to equip participants with essential cybersecurity skills to tackle modern security challenges effectively. Why This Workshop Matters With cyber threats evolving at an unprecedented pace, organizations must strengthen their cybersecurity posture to protect sensitive data and infrastructure. This workshop provides hands-on training, expert-led discussions, and real-world scenarios to ensure participants gain practical, actionable knowledge in key areas, including: - Emerging and Future Threats - Risk Management and Compliance - Current Cybersecurity Threats - Security Infrastructure and Tools - Security Standards and Frameworks For more information, visit: https://cybersecurityworkshop.oucreate.com/ Room: Room 205/206, Bldg: Carson Engineering Center, 202 W. Boyd St., University of Oklahoma, Norman Campus, Norman, Oklahoma, United States

This session will delve into the dynamic and rapidly advancing field of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), an innovative approach that merges traditional information retrieval techniques with generative AI models to produce content that is more accurate, relevant, and grounded in factual data. It will begin with an overview of the fundamental paradigms of RAG, emphasizing its distinction from purely generative or purely retrieval-based systems. The session will then explore the key technologies that power RAG, including vector databases, dense retrievers such as ChromaDB and FAISS, and advanced transformer-based language models like BERT and GPT. Attendees will gain insights into RAG pipeline architectures, integration complexities, and deployment strategies in real-world environments. The session will conclude with a discussion of emerging trends and research directions, such as domain-adapted RAG, low-latency retrieval, and scalable knowledge grounding, offering a comprehensive understanding of both the conceptual foundations and practical applications of RAG in today's AI landscape. Speaker(s): Dr. Rajanikanth Aluvalu Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/486210

You want to move into a leadership role — but the path from expert to leader isn’t what it used to be. In this session, we’ll explore what it really means to evolve beyond subject-matter expertise and step into transformative leadership during an era defined by AI acceleration and what futurist Jamais Cascio coined as the BANI era: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. What You’ll Take Away: - A deeper understanding of why today’s volatility demands more than just competence — it demands clarity, adaptability, and relational intelligence - A mindset shift from reactive problem-solver to systems-aware leader - New language and frameworks for building trust, influence, and decision-making power in uncertain environments - Tools to define your unique value as a future-ready leader — not just a domain expert Bonus Takeaway: Learn how AI isn’t replacing leaders — it’s revealing the gaps in human leadership. You’ll leave with a mental model to augment your intuition and strategic decision-making in real time. Speaker(s): Caroline Stokes Agenda: IEEE-USA's free webinars/events are designed to help you find your next job, maintain your career, negotiate an appropriate salary, understand ethical considerations in the workplace and learn about other career-building strategies and public policy developments that affect your profession. For information regarding upcoming webinars or to visit our vast webinar archive, please visit: (https://ieeeusa.org/careers/webinars/) (https://newsletter.smartbrief.com/rest/sign-up/2479DAB0-4089-43E7-925D-86AE0C1E6244?campaign=e0d52cef) Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/485051

In this talk, we'll explore various machine learning model optimization techniques, with a focus on fine-tuning and distillation. As models grow larger and more complex, optimizing them for efficiency is crucial, especially when deploying in resource constrained environments. We'll dive deep into fine-tuning and distillation, explaining their processes, benefits, and trade-offs. Additionally, we'll introduce LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) and QLoRA (Quantized LoRA), two cutting edge techniques that allow for efficient fine-tuning of large models, particularly large language models (LLMs), with minimal computational overhead. The session will also briefly cover other optimization methods, such as pruning, quantization, and reinforcement learning (RL), providing a comprehensive overview of how to select the right technique for different use cases. By the end of this talk, you'll have a deeper understanding of these optimization strategies and when to apply them to enhance model performance, scalability, and efficiency. Speaker(s): Raja Krishna Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/480233