Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-06-23


The meeting was called to order at 19:35 by psvenk.

In attendance were

        Student keyholders: psvenk, suufi, innaavo, rgabriel, skylarh

        Associate keyholders: almonds, petey

        Members: kboone, kawcco, guoj1112, ilyag

        Guests: Jorge

Administrivia:

        innaavo: We had ordered the extended battery model (EBM) for the UPS, which was $1440.71. During the meeting (2025-05-19) we thought there would be no shipping costs, because the last thing we ordered was also heavy and didn't cost anything to ship. But it cost $165. Last thing was 100 lb and this thing is 150 lb which is classified as freight shipping. We didn't know before because the procurement system had "shipping is best way surface, destination prepay add" which means the seller is responsible for getting it to us and adding on a line so we pay for shipping afterwards. So yeah.
        
        innaavo: Motion to allocate $165 to pay for shipping. So we have $5 left on our budget.
        
        [motion to allocate $165 for shipping passed 9-0-1]
        
        psvenk: Since we have $5, we shouldn't allocate anything else until the fiscal year is over. This excludes a mail-in allocation I made for sipb.cloud, a domain we own that has not been used afaik. It is currently a redirect to our website but there might be some mailboxes there too. That would be $31, which we are puting for the next fiscal year.
        
        guoj1112: When does the fiscal year roll over?
        
        psvenk: July 1. But data warehouse won't be available until July 2. So whenever we have access to the systems again.
        
        psvenk: [explains the SIPB meeting structure]
        
Project Reports:

        suufi: OpenGrades continues. UA did another advertisement with financial incentives. Trying to figure out if this should be a recurring thing. They do want to make this a continuous things, with raffles, food giveaways, etc. There are xxxx yy and zzz. I have lots of syllabi PDFs that I need to upload. I need to talk to LLMs to see if there is a RAG I can use.
        
        psvenk: What's RAG? I assume not a rag.
        
        kawcco: Retrieval-augmented generation. You have a corpus of data, and you have vector embeddings, and you can make search queries, and you have a bunch of tags, and then you give the tags to the LLMs.
        
        suufi: But LLMs can hallucinate...
        
        almonds: Data provenance can be a mitigation. I don't think we have a RAG model? You need a sort of embedder. We can install one if we don't yet.
        
        kawcco: We can take the most popular embedder.
        
        almonds: I use SentenceBERT with BERTopic.
        
        petey [in chat]: fwiw RAG techniques still can give misinfo —  
https://upstatement.com/blog/can-you-trust-an-ai-chatbot-with-college-admissions
 was unable to correctly characterize answers to MIT admissions policy questions
        
        almonds: I will be teaching 2 classes, which also means I will have less time for SIPB projects.
        
        rgabriel [in chat]: Petrock continues.
        
        psvenk: Should we give a brief description of each project? LLMs is... [explanation]
        
        almonds: You can learn more about it at llms.mit.edu.
        
        psvenk: Petrock is an authentication helper.
        
        almonds: [leaves] [rejoins] When I left I saw a message that e else left, but that's not true?
        
        guoj1112 and ilyag: ARK continues. [explanation of what they have done]
        
        psvenk: Can one of you explain what ARK is for the prefrosh?
        
        ilyag: ARK is a personal information manager which includes calendaring and helps you schedule things and integrates with your calendar, and allows you to say things like "I need to schedule a study session with this person in the next 2 days, please find the time slot and scheduling", "schedule a recurring session until the end of the semester", "what do I have tomorrow?", etc. Freeform calendar and organizer.
        
        guoj1112: Calendar is our focus for now, but we have more plans.
        
Other:

        suufi: We have $5 left in the account... what if we invested it in the stock market?
        
        psvenk: What if we made SIPB a publicly traded company and we did SIPB insider trading?
        
        guoj1112: That would be awful. I oppose it.
        
        petey [in chat]: thank you joshua for your integrity
        
        kawcco: ... profit ... You should ..., long term, ... clout [sorry I am on Jitsi could not hear everything]
        
        suufi: Instead of investing ... encore ...
        
Other Other:

        guoj1112: The deadline for renewing your certificate is very soon. Please renew by July 30. That is in 37 days.
        
        skylarh: ...I have been calculating this number for a long time...
        
        kawcco: You said what the project is but I don't know what quantity you are talking about.
        
        skylarh: [something physics]
        
        kawcco: I actually took a course on [something physics] so... it is a strange thing to call a number but it is a number.
        
        skylarh: It is similar to a vector. I used tensors in NumPy.
        
        kawcco: We are thinking of 2 very different things.
        
        skylarh: No, ... [elaboration]. I interpolated it to the probability distribution I need to sample for.
        
        petey [in chat]: it's good to see you all 
        
        petey [in chat]: that's my other other other 
        
        petey [in chat]: i don't know what numbers are 
        
        petey [in chat]: goodbye friends, hopefully see you next week 
        
        skylarh: I have been working on other things, so not much Eventful.

The meeting was adjourned at 19:56.

        Minutes taken by rgabriel, psvenk and submitted by rgabriel.