Automating cloud configuration and deployment remains a critical challenge due to evolving infrastructures, heterogeneous hardware, and fluctuating workloads. Existing solutions lack adaptability and require extensive manual tuning, leading to inefficiencies and misconfigurations. We introduce LADs, the first LLM-driven framework designed to tackle these challenges by ensuring robustness, adaptability, and efficiency in automated cloud management. Instead of merely applying existing techniques, LADs provides a principled approach to configuration optimization through in-depth analysis of what optimization works under which conditions. By leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Few-Shot Learning, Chain-of-Thought, and Feedback-Based Prompt Chaining, LADs generates accurate configurations and learns from deployment failures to iteratively refine system settings. Our findings reveal key insights into the trade-offs between performance, cost, and scalability, helping practitioners determine the right strategies for different deployment scenarios. For instance, we demonstrate how prompt chaining-based adaptive feedback loops enhance fault tolerance in multi-tenant environments and how structured log analysis with example shots improves configuration accuracy. Through extensive evaluations, LADs reduces manual effort, optimizes resource utilization, and improves system reliability. By open-sourcing LADs, we aim to drive further innovation in AI-powered DevOps automation.

Effective communication within universities is crucial for addressing the diverse information needs of students, alumni, and external stakeholders. However, existing chatbot systems often fail to deliver accurate, context-specific responses, resulting in poor user experiences. In this paper, we present KatzBot, an innovative chatbot powered by KatzGPT, a custom Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuned on domain-specific academic data. KatzGPT is trained on two university-specific datasets: 6,280 sentence-completion pairs and 7,330 question-answer pairs. KatzBot outperforms established existing open source LLMs, achieving higher accuracy and domain relevance. KatzBot offers a user-friendly interface, significantly enhancing user satisfaction in real-world applications. The source code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/AiAI-99/katzbot}.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning approach that addresses privacy and data transfer costs by computing data at the source. It's particularly popular for Edge and IoT applications where the aggregator server of FL is in resource-capped edge data centers for reducing communication costs. Existing cloud-based aggregator solutions are resource-inefficient and expensive at the Edge, leading to low scalability and high latency. To address these challenges, this study compares prior and new aggregation methodologies under the changing demands of IoT and Edge applications. This work is the first to propose an adaptive FL aggregator at the Edge, enabling users to manage the cost and efficiency trade-off. An extensive comparative analysis demonstrates that the design improves scalability by up to 4X, time efficiency by 8X, and reduces costs by more than 2X compared to extant cloud-based static methodologies.

Personalized FL has been widely used to cater to heterogeneity challenges with non-IID data. A primary obstacle is considering the personalization process from the client's perspective to preserve their autonomy. Allowing the clients to participate in personalized FL decisions becomes significant due to privacy and security concerns, where the clients may not be at liberty to share private information necessary for producing good quality personalized models. Moreover, clients with high-quality data and resources are reluctant to participate in the FL process without reasonable incentive. In this paper, we propose PI-FL, a one-shot personalization solution complemented by a token-based incentive mechanism that rewards personalized training. PI-FL outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches and can generate good-quality personalized models while respecting clients' privacy.