UPCOMING EVENT
Intelligent Information Retrieval for CJIS: An AI and Search Workshop
When: November 18, 2025 9AM to 5PM
Where: Holiday Inn, Bridgeport, WV
Join me on November 18, 2025, for a day of hands-on learning around LLMs, NLP, and search tailored for a CJIS audience.
We will dive into the aforementioned topics and write code that address real-world problems using tools such as Amazon Bedrock and OpenSearch.
Bring your laptop for a day of learning and hands-on activities!
This workshop will talk about commercial offerings such as Amazon Bedrock but will strive to be vendor-agnostic and will focus on open source software over commercial offerings when possible.
Questions? Get in touch!
Meet Jeff, your guide.
Jeff Zemerick is an experienced expert in the areas of cloud, natural language processing, and search. As seasoned cloud engineer, Jeff has earned all 16 AWS certifications and helped author the AWS certification exams.
Jeff has spoken at over 15 industry conferences on topics ranging from data, NLP, cloud, and search. He believes strongly in sharing knowledge and open source software.
Jeff is chair of the Apache OpenNLP project and has been involved with the project for about 15 years as a user and contributor. Jeff is an active member of the OpenSearch community and maintainer on an OpenSearch project related to search relevance.
Today, Jeff is an independent consultant providing hands-on work and advisory services to clients in the areas of cloud, search, data, and NLP. He has worked with companies of all sizes from new startups to large enterprise companies to help them implement cloud architectures and define NLP/AI/ML and data strategy,
Jeff is familiar with the CJIS environment from his experience on the N-DEx project. Learn more about Jeff on his website at https://www.jeffzemerick.dev.
Event Schedule
The schedule below is subject to change prior to the start of the workshop and during the workshop based on the attendees' primary interests as the day progresses. If everyone is more interested in a particular topic we may divert and focus more on that topic for a bit longer.
If you have any questions on the topics covered or would like to request extra focus on specific areas, please reach out.
November 18, 2025
Holiday Inn
Bridgeport, WV
8:45 AM
Arrival and Welcome
Get situated, introductions, and overview of the day's goals. Set up your laptop to be able to actively participate in the hands-on parts.
9:00 AM
Foundations of NLP and the Rise of LLMs
We will do a deep dive into the core concepts and tasks of NLP. I will discuss some real-world NLP projects. Then, we will track the progression of NLP into LLMs. We will look at the roles of traditional statistical NLP models and LLMs in today's landscape. The hands-on activity will use Amazon Bedrock to interact with LLM(s).
10:45 AM
LLM Prompt Engineering
We will get into LLM prompting. What makes a good prompt? We will look at prompt engineering across different LLMs. The hands-on activity will use Amazon Bedrock to write prompts for various LLMs and for different purposes.
12:00 PM
Lunch
Lunch is not provided, so please bring your own lunch or help yourself to one of the nearby restaurants.
1:00 PM
Implementing and Improving Search with AI Models
We will dig into OpenSearch and learn about its capabilities. We will look at vector search, hybrid search, and we will learn how to measure and improve search results. The hands-on activity will be interacting with OpenSearch to experiment with the different types of searches and search metrics.
2:45 PM
Applying AI with Amazon OpenSearch
We will explore how OpenSearch integrates with AI, looking at topics such as k-NN search and RAG. The hands-on activity will bring everything together from the day to build an AI-powered search application.
4:30 PM
Q&A and Summary
Time for open discussion and questions along with a summary of what we learned and did today.
© 2025 Jeff Zemerick. All Rights Reserved.