Food Safety Virtual Office Hours

The Nuts and Bolts of AI

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 | 12:00 to 1:00 pm Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Join us for the next session of Food Safety Virtual Office Hours, where Luke Qian, YeonJin Jung, and Calvin Slaughter will provide an introduction to large language models (LLMs) and approaches for getting more useful and reliable food safety responses from them. This session will cover key LLM terminology and concepts, including options for hosting models locally. The speakers will also introduce several approaches for customizing LLMs, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning, before concluding with an introduction to agentic AI and how it expands the capabilities of traditional LLM-based tools.

Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in a moderated Q&A and discussion with a panel of experts. Food Safety Virtual Office Hours are hosted in collaboration with the New York Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence, and the IFS@CU.

Panel of Experts

• YeonJin Jung, Dept. of Food Science, Cornell University
• Dr. Luke Qian, Postdoctoral Associate, Dept. of Food Science, Cornell University
• Calvin Slaughter, Dept. of Food Science, Cornell University
• Dr. Abby Snyder (moderator), Associate Professor, Dept. of Food Science, Cornell University

More Details

• Intended Audience: Open to anyone in the food industry from farm to fork.
• Cost: Free
• Registration Required: cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/2kjZ5wrvRQS7M0PA7EvOhw
  • After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the session.