A 40-minute keynote at SITCON 2025, where I shared insights on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and my experience building the Chingshin RAG project.
2025
Designer & Speaker
Affinity Publisher, Apple Keynote
Project Overview
SITCON is one of, if not the largest student developer conference in Taiwan. I was first introduced to this community by Andrew Kuo, who had previously given an excellent talk on LLMs there. He was the one who encouraged me to develop my “Chingshin RAG” project into a full-length keynote.
To be honest, I was hesitant at first. The thought of delivering a 40-minute talk at a conference I had never attended was daunting. But looking back, the decision was not just a memorable experience—it was perspective-changing.
Content Planning
The real challenge began in early February after my submission was accepted.
Initially, I planned to focus only on the project itself. However, I soon realized it was more important to explain why we need RAG in the first place and to break down its core concepts.
Ultimately, I structured my talk around three key points:
- Three potential causes of model hallucination
- Three main architectures of RAG
- Hands-on experience from developing Chingshin RAG
Planning this part was particularly challenging because the implementations, classifications, and naming conventions for RAG found online are quite chaotic. To build my content on a solid foundation, I heavily referenced a very well-written academic paper, which became the central framework for my entire presentation.
With these concepts laid out, sharing my experience of developing the “Chingshin RAG” project became a natural conclusion.
Presentation Design
The visual style for this keynote was an extension of the project proposal slides I had previously designed for GenAI Stars.
To enrich the style, I used a mix of different fonts and layouts:
- Source Han Serif for the body text
- Lanting Black for the titles
All the slides were designed in Affinity Publisher 2. I love this software; it’s a one-time purchase and offers powerful, intuitive tools that suit me better than Adobe's subscription model. After designing all the content, I exported each page as a 3840×2160 PNG and then layered and animated them one by one in Apple Keynote. This workflow is definitely not something I would recommend, especially since any adjustments required re-exporting the slices, and the animation process was quite slow. Although time-consuming, the final result, combined with the smooth design process in Affinity, made the presentation look dynamic and lively.
Acknowledgements
The most unforgettable part of the entire SITCON journey was the people. I met a group of passionate and helpful individuals. This was especially evident during the rehearsal, where I could feel everyone's dedication to the event. The organizing team gave me a lot of practical and constructive feedback, and this keynote wouldn't have been the same without them.
I want to extend my sincere gratitude to the SITCON 2025 organizing team, especially AK, Danny, and everyone who provided feedback during the rehearsal. This talk would not have been possible without your support and encouragement. Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way; you made this journey meaningful and truly unforgettable.