Local AI for Home Life – Workshop with Alessandro Piemontesi

Three evenings at the Lab to learn how to use local AI for household tasks: documents, bills, medical reports, and the family budget.

Generative artificial intelligence has made its way into our homes before we’ve had time to understand it. We use it to write emails, to help our children with their homework, and to get explanations for things—almost always through an online service, and almost always without knowing what happens to the information we provide.

Yet the documents that matter most—contracts, bills, medical reports, bank statements—are exactly the ones no one would want to upload to an external service. That’s when a program running on your own computer stops being a novelty and becomes an essential household tool.

This workshop is a three-evening course: we start with the basics and end up with tools that work and that you can take home. Each participant works at a dedicated workstation in the Lab, using machines capable of running the latest-generation models—and the files stay right where they are.

Tuesday, September 15 · The Basics · 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
What is a language model, and how does it differ when it runs on your home computer instead of on a remote server? The rules for getting a model to understand you and the mistakes everyone makes at first.
In the lab: a personalized educational tutor to use with your children, which explains complex subjects in an understandable and patient way; and household logistics, including weekly menus, shopping lists, and travel itineraries.

Friday, September 18 · Documents, Rights, and Well-Being · 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
RAG technology—“chat with your documents”—to let the model read your files, with the right guardrails to keep it on track.
In the workshop: analysis of contracts and bills (electricity, gas, mortgages, estimates) to uncover hidden costs and due dates; translating medical reports and blood test results into understandable language so you’re prepared for your doctor’s appointment; guided drafting of formal notices and bureaucratic documents for everyday matters and condominium issues.

Tuesday , September 22 · Personal Finance and Dashboards · 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
How to overcome the computational limitations of language models through structured reasoning.
Hands-on workshop: automatic categorization of expenses based on bank statements and guided creation of a family budget dashboard in HTML—visual, private, and designed to be kept open in your home browser to track savings and spending.

Who it's for: people who have never created a form on their computer and want to start from the basics, and those who handle confidential documents and don't feel comfortable uploading them to an external service. You don't need to know how to code, and you don't need a powerful computer—we'll provide the workstations.

What to bring home home:

• • a model that runs on your machine, and the criteria for choosing which one
  • a system for searching your documents without them leaving your computer
  • A method for reading contracts and bills without missing any clauses
  • a family budget dashboard that continues to work after the course ends

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The course costs €130 for non-members and 100 credits for Asperastra members. The member-only code is included in the newsletter and waives the ticket fee on Eventbrite: you won’t be charged anything online, but the workshop isn’t free, and the 100 credits will be deducted at the Lab. If you’re not yet a member and want the member rate, stop by the Lab before the workshop: you can sign up there. Registration takes place on the first session, Tuesday, September 15, and the ticket covers all three evenings.

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