Adelaide University Industry Project - Yong Kheng Beh
Welcome Yong Kheng!
Yong Kheng Beh joined our SAcommunity Team for her University of Adelaide SET (Sciences, Engineering and Technology) Industry Project for her Masters of Computing and Innovation Semester 1, 2024: 27th February 2024 - 7th June 2024.
She worked on her industry project onsite with SAcommunity at the Connecting Up Office, Infoxchange for 2 days (15 hours) a week with her Industry Project Team members: Violet Zewei You, Jamie Jiemin Zhang and Clover Xinyue Luo.
Congratulations Yong Kheng Beh on your new role as a Software Developer at YourAnswer! Thank you for coming to visit us at the office to tell us the great news and respond to all our questions about your university studies, industry project, AI and more on 16 October 2024.
Total Hours 192 Joined 27 February 2024 Last Check-in 16 October 2024
Yong Kheng Beh Visits Connecting Up 16 September 2024
Tien Tang My Au, Jason Chun Kwan Lam, Yong Kheng Beh and Eily Lee Selvam
Personal Biography
Yong Kheng is currently a second-year student studying Masters of Computing and Innovation at the University of Adelaide. In 2014, she obtained her Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from the University of Malaya, Malaysia, and accrued 8 years of experience working as a doctor. In December 2023 - February 2024, she completed a summer research project scholarship at the Australian Institute of Machine Learning (AIML), where she explored the application of machine learning models in predicting patient outcomes following cardiac surgery.
At Connecting Up, Yong Kheng and her teammates are planning to contribute to the SAcommunity website by developing and integrating a chatbot. This initiative aims to enhance clients' search experience for their Masters Industry Project. When not studying, Yong Kheng, who is a plant and animal lover, spends some of her free time volunteering at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and with the RSPCA at their animal shelter.
Yong Kheng's future goal is to fully utilize her knowledge in both medical and computer science and contribute to the medical field using technology. She aims to incorporate technology into medical industry to optimize doctors' work performance and enhance accessibility and healthcare experiences for patients.
Image: Project Initiation Launch Meeting with Client 15 March 2024
Image: Project Initiation Launch Meeting with Client 15 March 2024 Yong Kheng and her team from University of Adelaide initiated their Masters of Computing and Innovation project in February 2024. Seeking a real-world application for their master's project, Violet Zewei from the team, who is also an intern at Connecting up, approached the company with a project proposal.
Connecting Up identified an opportunity to enhance the SAcommunity website's search capabilities. The team recognized the potential to significantly improve user experience through integrating an AI-powered chatbot. In collaboration with Connecting Up, a chatbot project was developed as a promising solution. This innovative approach not only aligned with the master's program objectives but also presented a complex and viable alternative to the current search function.
Yong Kheng was the primary developer of the chatbot's backend, alongside Violet Zewei. Yong Kheng contributed the majority of the code related to LangChain, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to easily create LLM-powered applications. Much of the knowledge was self-taught, with special thanks to the DeepLearning.AI website by Andrew Ng, the LangChain documentation website, and its YouTube channel for teaching on how to use LangChain.
Within a 12-week timeframe, the team developed a LLM-powered chatbot to complement the website's search function. Accesible as a pop-up on the main page, the chatbot can query the website database for communities or services, interpret vague requests, conduct searches and correct typos.
An in-depth explanation about the chatbot architecture, technologies and development can be found here.
Image: Demonstration with Data Lead Volunteer Stathis Avramis
Image: Industry Project Brainstorming
After that, the project team brainstormed on the technology to use for the chatbot. After consulting and conducting online research, they decided to use LangChain as the project's main architecture.
Image: Yong Kheng's Learnings from DeepLearning.ai for Chatbot Project
The team engaged in self-learning and shared their knowledge during onsite meetings, applying what they learned to the chatbot development.
Image: Meeting 5 April 2024 with Cameron BrownThroughout the project, regular meetings were held to keep the web developers at Connecting Up updated on progress and to obtain permission to modify some of the existing website code for the chatbot implementation.
Image: Meeting 26 April James Newport and Cameron Brown
Image: Final client meeting on 31st May with Pankaj Chhalotre, James Newport and Cameron Brown
Image: Chatbot project demonstration in University of Adelaide on 7th June 2024
Finally, after completing the chatbot, the team presented their final program during a demo presentation at the University of Adelaide.
Finally, after completing the chatbot, the team presented their final program during a demo presentation at the University of Adelaide.
Image: Demo interaction with Chatbot on SAcommunity development environment.
Work experience - Internal and External Events, Connections and Networks
Volunteers and interns are encouraged to attend monthly SAcommunity Team meetings, Connecting Up staff meetings, as well as quarterly all-staff Infoxchange Town Hall meetings to understand more about the organisation as a whole.
Organisation-wide news, events and projects are communicated through the staff channels, with weekly CEO Updates from David Spriggs, informal 'Lunch and Learn' educational sessions, and network meetings create connections with staff and other volunteers. Interns are also given opportunities to attend stakeholder and partner events.
Relevant meetings Yong Kheng has attended include:
Connecting Up Monthly Staff Meetings on 12 March 2024 and 1 May 2024
Updates from the Connecting Up Team includes monthly highlights, plans, activities
Infoxchange (IX) All Staff Town Hall Meeting 27 February 2024
Updates from the Infoxchange CEO, Operations, Finance, People & Culture, Lightning Talks from IX Teams, & IXcel Awards
This meeting started with different departments like finance, operations etc. updating the staff about the current projects and the company's future. After speeches from the CEO and other team leads, the individuals with excellent performances were rewarded with the IXcel awards. This meeting was was a great opportunity for better understanding the company's workplace culture and leadership structure. This expanded Yong Kheng's understanding of how a company operates and how different roles working independently eventually all tie up together to keep the company moving forward.
Updates from the Infoxchange CEO, Operations, Finance, People & Culture, Lightning Talks from IX Teams, & IXcel Awards
This meeting started with different departments like finance, operations etc. updating the staff about the current projects and the company's future. After speeches from the CEO and other team leads, the individuals with excellent performances were rewarded with the IXcel awards. This meeting was was a great opportunity for better understanding the company's workplace culture and leadership structure. This expanded Yong Kheng's understanding of how a company operates and how different roles working independently eventually all tie up together to keep the company moving forward.
IX Stakeholder Events
Data Catalyst Network (DCN): Brings together people from across sectors, to break cycles of disadvantage through the innovative use of data.
Participants of the Data Catalyst Network will advance their data maturity while sharing and improving data insights through unique cross-sector partnerships to disrupt disadvantage. As a collective, the network will harness data and knowledge from the not-for-profit community sector, academia, government and business to better use and manage data to improve the lives of people across Australia.
Image: DCN: Augmented Intelligence; Combining Organisation Data with Large Language Models Webinar
DCN: Augmented Intelligence; Combining Organisation Data with Large Language Models 29 February 2024
Associate Professor Amir Aryani, Head of the Social Data Analytics Lab at Swinburne University.
The webinar was presented by Associate Professor Amir Aryani from Swinburne University of Technology, focusing primarily on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). He began with a simple introduction to Generative AI and highlighted the privacy concerns associated with entrusting data to Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.
The proposed solution for privacy protection involves downloading an open-source LLM and operating it behind a firewall. However, open-source LLMs may lack updated knowledge or may not contain specific information required for client interaction. This is where RAG comes into play. RAG, an augmented retrieval intelligence, utilizes artificial intelligence to retrieve information from a database to generate more accurate responses.
In conclusion, using RAG with open-source LLMs hosted on proprietary infrastructure can mitigate the risks associated with data privacy and security, allowing not-for-profit organizations to offer more responsive community support. Nonetheless, implementing RAG with LLMs poses additional concerns, including data management, infrastructure requirements, talent and skill acquisition, maintenance, cost, and ongoing monitoring for ethical and transparent AI usage. Yong Kheng found this session's timing was perfect and provided Yong Kheng with a clearer understanding for initiating the chatbot project.
Image: Effective Meetings and Communication Skills Webinar
IX Lunch & Learn Sessions
Effective Meeting & Communication Skills 5 March 2024
The session was conducted by Kate Hickman, Chief People Officer of InfoXchange, and Jo Davies, Chief Operating Officer of InfoXchange. They shared valuable skills on how to hold effective meetings and improve communication.
From this session, Yong Kheng learned about proper meeting etiquette and key principles for successful meetings. Always start by explaining why a meeting is needed and consider alternatives such as messages, emails, or phone calls, which can sometimes be more effective. When discussing effective written communication, an interesting fact emerged: sending many emails can increase your carbon footprint, especially when using "reply all." Therefore, avoid including people when it's unnecessary. Yong Kheng also learned how to write short, effective emails and the suggested format for doing so, which was an eye-opener.
Image: Lunch Session - World Autism Month webinar
Lunch Session - World Autism Month | Key Speaker: Jim Mullan (CEO at Amaze) 5 April 2024
Held during World Autism Month on April 5, 2024, the lunch session webinar aimed to raise awareness of autism in the workplace. Key speaker Jim Mullan, CEO of Amaze, discussed the challenges faced by autistic employees, highlighting the often-misunderstood signs and symptoms of autism spectrum compared to common stereotypes. Mullan also outlined how Amaze supports employers in creating inclusive work environments to attract, retain, and develop autistic talent. While progress has been made, ongoing efforts to foster greater understanding and acceptance of autism are essential. Yong Kheng found this session informative and reassuring, emphasizing the increasing support available for individuals with autism.
Image: Lunch & Learn | The Journey Towards Treaty during NAIDOC week
Lunch & Learn | The Journey Towards Treaty 9 July 2024
Tracey L. Evans from the Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions (DJSIR) provided an overview of the First People's Assembly of Victoria, which comprises 32 traditional owners of the country. Tracey represents a general seat for the Aboriginal people in the Melbourne Metropolitan Region, having been elected by her community. She explained that the Assembly includes 11 reserved seats for traditional owners, ensuring diverse and rich discussions aimed at advocating for Aboriginal rights and advancing the path towards a treaty.
Tracey elaborated on the goals of the Assembly, emphasizing their shared mission to secure the rights of Aboriginal people through robust and collaborative conversations. She provided an overview of what a treaty entails and its significance in formalizing the recognition of Aboriginal rights. For many years, her people are still fighting for their rights and many improvement had made but their are more to fight for her people. She encouraged participants to stay involved with the Assembly's work and participate in NAIDOC events, highlighting the importance of community engagement and support.
Digital Training & Development
Volunteers and interns have access to the Connecting Up Digital Learning Platform providing live webinars and recorded webinars, workshops and webcons presented by subject-matter experts to understand more about a range of technology topics for the not-for-profit sector.
Relevant training sessions were selected, attended, summarised and assessed by Yong Kheng to look at how these sessions can enhance her experience in Connecting Up:
Generative AI for NFPs
Yong Kheng's Certificate of Completion >> here
Kaitlin, the speaker of this webinar started of by giving simple introduction of what is a generative AI. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence which generates response according to the input given. A famous generative AI during this webinar was ChatGPT which reach 1 million of users in just 5 days after launch. Even though generative AI is very useful in various field, it also poses a few concerns which are: data privacy, accountability, safety, transparency and bias. There are a few scenario in which ChatGPT had bias such as resume which bias towards men and also incident of hallucination where an Australian mayor was falsely accused by ChatGPT to have convicted of bribery when he was in fact the whistleblower. Thereafter, ChatGPT and Gemini currently put a disclaimer to ensure users to double-check for any hallucination.
Despite the flaws of generative AI, Kaitlin mentioned on ways NFPs can still utilize generative AI such as enhanced accessibility by speech to text, text to speech, object recognition, using generative AI to generate personalised content, marketing, communications and more. She then explained the basics of prompt engineering to helps NFPs to generate relevant content safely.
AI 101: Empowering NFPs for the digital era
Yong Kheng's Certificate of Completion >> here
Kate started the webinar with a brief introduction to AI before quickly moving into the topic of how NFPs can use AI. For users with no experience in using AI, she recommended starting with the current tools they already use, such as Canva, HubSpot, and social platforms that are integrated with AI features. Without wasting time, she then moved on to examples and demonstrations of how to use AI in various situations. It all comes down to good prompt engineering. A useful tip she mentioned is to ask ChatGPT to write an example prompt; the more specific the prompt, the better the performance. There is also an additional feature to customize ChatGPT for specific roles. The webinar ended with a showcase of videos generated by AI Sora. Yong Kheng found the examples in this webinar useful and definitely applicable to the chatbot project as well as future work.
Six Data Collection Essentials with Google Sheets and Forms
Yong Kheng's Certificate of Completion >> here
This webinar teaches the basics of using Google Sheets and Google Forms, which are very useful for beginners and also for people who want to discover more features. Pablo gave an overview of Google Sheets and Google Forms, provided example scenarios for both, and allowed us listeners some time for hands-on practice with class exercises. New features Yong Kheng learned from this webinar include the comment and tag feature, the drop-down feature of Google Sheets, and everything about Google Forms.
Yong Kheng's Certificate of Completion >> here
This webinar teaches the basics of using Google Sheets and Google Forms, which are very useful for beginners and also for people who want to discover more features. Pablo gave an overview of Google Sheets and Google Forms, provided example scenarios for both, and allowed us listeners some time for hands-on practice with class exercises. New features Yong Kheng learned from this webinar include the comment and tag feature, the drop-down feature of Google Sheets, and everything about Google Forms.
SAcommunity Team Members 2024 - at National Volunteer Week 20-26 May 2024
Image: SAcommunity Interns and Volunteers Anju Odedara, Violet Zewei You, Jamie Jiemin Zhang, Yong Kheng Beh(Me), Clover Xinyue Luo, Yi Han, Jay Shijie Zhang, Kristen Ngoc Khanh Mai Nguyen, Harsh Bhatt, Tanvi Srivastava, Joe Xuanqiao Zhang, Sylvia Shiwen Cao, Olivia Thi Kim Oanh Nguyen
Image: SAcommunity Interns and Volunteers Anju Odedara, Violet Zewei You, Jamie Jiemin Zhang, Yong Kheng Beh(Me), Clover Xinyue Luo, Yi Han, Jay Shijie Zhang, Kristen Ngoc Khanh Mai Nguyen, Harsh Bhatt, Tanvi Srivastava, Joe Xuanqiao Zhang, Sylvia Shiwen Cao, Olivia Thi Kim Oanh Nguyen
Yong Kheng's University of Adelaide Industry Project Experience Summary:
Volunteering and working onsite at Connecting Up for the industry project was an amazing experience. The staff and volunteers were friendly and helpful, and I made many friends during this period. Special thanks to Pankaj Chhalotre, the head of Connecting Up, for accepting our project proposal and providing valuable feedback. James Newport, the senior web developer, and Cameron Brown, the junior web developer at Connecting Up, also gave us useful feedback on our chatbot and provided assistance when we needed it most. Catherine McIntyre, the community information and volunteer/intern coordinator, was always supportive and provided the resources we needed for our project. Special thanks also to Pujan Maharjan, a volunteer at Connecting Up, for recommending LangChain, a major component of our chatbot. Their collective support and encouragement were vital to our project's success, and I am deeply thankful for their contributions.
Creating the chatbot was not an overnight success. Our team had no experience in software development, let alone implementing a LLM-powered chatbot, which is still a very new and hot topic this year. We spent many hours learning new skills on the go while producing deliverables for our project, ensuring we could update our client, Connecting Up, on our progress during our bi-weekly meetings. We were fortunate to receive positive feedback and encouragement from our client during every meeting, which motivated us to perform even better and reassured us that our hard work was paying off. I am extremely thankful for my teammates who had confidence in my ability to quickly learn new skills and apply them to the chatbot. Knowing my team was there to test my code and handle the connections and frontend allowed me to focus entirely on the backend and optimize the code to the best of my abilities.
Nonetheless, even though we were just doing our industry project with Connecting Up, I had the opportunity to join company meetings, network with the staff and volunteers, and access their online digital platform for additional knowledge. I found it extremely valuable to have access to webinars as I am continually striving to obtain more knowledge and microcredentials to increase my employability while staying updated with the latest technological advancements, which seem to progress exponentially nowadays.
Overall, this industry project enabled me to write my first program in a real-world situation, providing valuable insights into software development. It also increased my confidence in my ability to learn new skills on the go and apply them to solve current problems.
Yong Kheng Beh Visits Connecting Up with Q&A 16 October 2024
Yong Kheng visited Connecting Up to let us know about her exciting new role and fielded multiple questions on her studies and industry project from our new interns and volunteers - Thank you Yong Kheng!
