Riya Joshi
As a Data and Applied Scientist at Microsoft with 7 years of experience spanning multiple geographies, I specialize in harnessing the power of AI to transform products and user experiences. My work ranges from developing on device AI models to implementing large language models that revolutionize how data science is practiced at scale. With a Master's degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I bring both academic rigor and practical expertise to every challenge, consistently pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve.
Session
How can you use LLMs in professional settings where cloud APIs are off-limits due to cost, privacy, or compliance? In this talk, we’ll explore how to run powerful, open-source models like Mistral and LLaMA locally — and make them useful in the real world.
We’ll cover the engineering patterns, trade-offs, and deployment approaches that make local LLMs production-ready. You’ll learn how to build a private internal knowledge assistant that runs completely offline using RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), local embeddings, and quantized models. A short live demo will show it in action — answering organization-specific questions without sending a single token to the cloud.