talk-data.com

I'm excited to announce another meetup! If you're interested in give a talk, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]

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All talks will be presented in English, to ensure that as many people as possible can participate and engage at this event.

If you want to attend, please RSVP to secure your spot - this will make organizing easier. Thank you so much ♥️

Location: Spiced Academy, Ritterstrasse 12, 10969 Berlin, 2. Hof

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🏠 18:00 - Arrival: Networking, Drinks & Snacks (30 min.) Grab yourself snacks & drinks and say hello to everybody else!

📅 18:30 - So you want to observe an Event Driven System? (45 min.) 🎙️Speaker: Roman Boiko, Enterprise Sales Engineer @ Datadog

Event-driven architectures offer powerful decoupling, but they often shatter traditional monitoring strategies. When a single business process jumps across multiple queues, buses, and microservices, tracing the line between cause and effect becomes a complex puzzle. This talk bridges that visibility gap by exploring practical observability strategies using OpenTelemetry. We will navigate the critical architectural decisions behind distributed tracing - specifically choosing between Span Linking and Parent-Child relationships - and master context propagation to ensure no transaction is lost in the noise. Join us to learn how to connect low-level technical data with high-level business metrics, turning asynchronous complexity into a clear, manageable system.

Roman Boiko is a Senior Enterprise Sales Engineer at Datadog, where he helps developers and architects build reliable, observable, and scalable systems. With a strong background in serverless and cloud-native architectures, he’s passionate about bridging the gap between engineering and operations to help teams move faster with confidence. Roman frequently speaks at tech events, sharing practical insights on observability, distributed systems, and modern application design. He enjoys exploring how developers can simplify complexity and deliver better software through data-driven decisions.

📅 19:15 - Datadog at Zendesk - a solid foundation for scalable, reliable and cost efficient systems (30 min.) 🎙️Speaker: Anatoly Mikhaylov, Principal Software Engineer & Datadog Ambassador @ Zendesk

Anatoly will share practical and valuable lessons what value Datadog brings and what role it plays at Zendesk. They customized and encorporated observability triad (APM, Logs and metrics) within a large volume of systems and applications. Zendesk made it work very well at scale and so that Datadog became a common language engineers and product teams can speak to one another. A single picture often helps to narrow down the issue, surface the problem, brings the solution and be confident remediation is applied successfully. Zendesk teams are fluent using complex Datadog tools and drive necessary changes.

📅 19:45 - Continuous Profiling with Datadog (30 min.) 🎙️Speaker: Felix Geisendörfer, Senior Staff Engineer @ Datadog

Description following

🥗 20:15 - Drinks, Food & Networking Enjoy refreshments while networking with community peers!

👋 21:00 - Goodbye, see you next time!

>>>Note importante — veuillez vous inscrire à l’événement ICI

Rejoignez-nous à Paris pour une matinée consacrée aux architectures et technologies qui permettent de construire la prochaine génération de systèmes de données haute performance. Ce meetup rassemble des experts d’AWS, Aerospike et Adikteev pour explorer comment les plateformes modernes fournissent des données en temps réel, des charges de travail IA extensibles et une résilience native au cloud. Découvrez comment AWS EC2 Graviton redéfinit l’efficacité du calcul, pourquoi la latence P99 détermine les performances réelles de vos applications, et comment Adikteev a réussi à migrer une infrastructure de compteurs à l’échelle du milliard sans aucune interruption de service. Vous verrez également comment l’architecture temps réel et à faible latence d’Aerospike soutient des décisions pilotées par l’IA à l’échelle mondiale. La matinée se conclura par un panel technique, une session de questions-réponses et un temps de networking avec des ingénieurs, architectes et experts qui façonnent l’avenir des systèmes temps réel.

Inscrivez-vous dès maintenant et rejoignez la conversation sur la prochaine génération des architectures de données, de calcul et d’IA en temps réel.

>>>Note importante — veuillez vous inscrire à l’événement ICI

***Programme de l’événement***

08:30-09:00 - Boissons et networking

09:00-09:15 - Introduction - Performance, Scalabilité et TCO : Les nouveaux standards de l'infrastructure temps réel Pierre Berard, Regional Manager Southern Europe, Aerospike

09:15-09:35 - Concevoir des architectures performantes avec AWS EC2 Graviton Romain Legret, Specialist Solutions Architect - Efficient Compute, AWS

Les clients AWS lancent chaque année des dizaines de milliards d’instances EC2, en choisissant parmi une gamme toujours plus large d’options de calcul, de stockage, de mémoire et de réseau. Cette session présente comment des innovations telles que le système Nitro et les processeurs Graviton déportent certaines tâches vers le matériel, améliorant ainsi les performances et la sécurité. Vous découvrirez comment ces technologies rendent possibles des cas d’usage autrefois inaccessibles pour vos charges de travail.

09:35-10:05 - P99 vous ment Nicolas Wlodarczyk, Sales Engineer, Aerospike

Pourquoi les performances de votre application sont dictées par sa transaction la plus lente, et comment PayPal tire parti des transactions en temps réel pour améliorer la détection de la fraude tout en réduisant les coûts. À l’image de PayPal pour la lutte contre la fraude, les environnements modernes reposent de plus en plus sur des architectures distribuées et des micro-services pour faire fonctionner applications et sites web. Nous explorerons des cas concrets issus du monde réel, comme PayPal et TomTom, afin de montrer comment améliorer la latence de fin de distribution (tail latency) tout en réduisant le coût total de possession (TCO) de votre plateforme temps réel.

10:05-10:15 - Migration d’une infrastructure de compteurs à l'échelle du milliard sans interruption de service Seiji Fouquet, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Adikteev Youcef Sebiat, Data Engineering Team Lead, Adikteev

Découvrez comment Adikteev a migré sa base de données de compteurs haute performance de ScyllaDB vers Aerospike sans interruption de service. Nous aborderons les défis techniques liés au déplacement d'une charge de 1M lectures/s et chargement de 300 Go de données quotidiennes, notre stratégie de migration, et les enseignements clés de cette modernisation d'infrastructure.

10:15-10:35 - Faire passer les systèmes temps réel à l’échelle : retours d’expérience du terrain * Seiji Fouquet, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Adikteev * Youcef Sebiat, Data Engineering Team Lead, Adikteev * Modéré par Pierre Berard, Regional Manager Southern Europe, Aerospike

Les responsables de l’ingénierie chez Adikteev partagent leurs retours d’expérience concrets sur l’exploitation et la montée en charge de systèmes de données temps réel en production, en abordant les choix d’architecture, les défis de performance et ce qu’il faut réellement pour opérer des plateformes à faible latence à grande échelle.

10:35-10:45 - Questions / Réponses

10:45-11:15 - Rencontres & échanges

>>>Note importante — veuillez vous inscrire à l’événement ICI

Google SRE NYC proudly announces our last Google SRE NYC Tech Talk for 2025.

This event is co-sponsored by sentry.io. Thank you Sentry for your partnership!

Let's farewell 2025 with three amazing interactive short talks on Site Reliability and DevOps topics! As always the event will include an opportunity to mingle with the speakers and attendees over some light snacks and beverages after the talks.

The Meetup will take place on Tuesday, 16th of December 2025 at 6:00 PM at our Chelsea Markets office in NYC. The doors will open at 5:30 pm. Pls RSVP only if you're able to attend in-person, there will be no live streaming.

When RSVP'ing to this event, please enter your full name exactly as it appears on your government issued ID. You will be required to present your ID at check in.

Agenda: Paul Jaffre - Senior Developer Experience Engineer\, sentry.io One Trace to Rule Them All: Unifying Sentry Errors with OpenTelemetry tracing SREs face the challenge of operating reliable observability infrastructure while avoiding vendor lock-in from proprietary APM (Application Performance Monitoring) solutions. OpenTelemetry has become the standard for instrumenting applications, allowing teams to collect traces, metrics, and logs. But raw telemetry data isn't enough. SREs need tools to visualize, debug, and respond to production incidents quickly. Sentry now supports OTLP, enabling teams to send OpenTelemetry data directly to Sentry for analysis. This talk covers how Sentry's OTLP support works in practice: connecting frontend and backend traces across services, correlating logs with distributed traces, and using tools to identify slow queries and performance bottlenecks. We'll discuss the practical benefits for SREs, like faster incident resolution, better cross-team debugging, and the flexibility to change observability backends without re-instrumenting code. Paul’s background spans engineering, product management, UX design, and open source. He has a soft spot for dev tools and loses sleep over making things easy to understand and use. Paul has a dynamic professional background, from strategy to stability. His time at Krossover Intelligence established a strong foundation by blending Product Management with hands-on development, and he later focused on core reliability at MakerBot, where he implemented automated end-to-end testing and drove performance improvements. He then extended this expertise in stability and scale at Cypress.io, where he served as a Developer Experience Engineer, focusing on improving workflow, contribution, and usability for their widely adopted open-source community.

Thiara Ortiz - Cloud Gaming SRE Manager\, Netflix Managing Black Box Systems SREs often face ambiguity when managing black box systems (LLMs, Games, Poorly Understood Dependencies). We will discuss how Netflix monitors service health as black boxes using multiple measurement techniques to understand system behavior, aligning with the need for robust observability tools. These strategies are crucial for system reliability and user experience. By proactively identifying and resolving issues, we ensure smoother playback experience and maintain user trust, even as the platform continues to evolve and gain maturity. The principles shared within this talk can be expanded to other applications such as AI reliability in data quality and model deployments.

Thiara has worked at some of the largest internet companies in the world, Meta and Netflix. During her time at Meta, Thiara found a passion for distributed systems and bringing new hardware into production. Always curious to explore new solutions to complex problems, Thiara developed Fleet Scanner, internally known as Lemonaid, to perform memory, compute, and storage benchmarks on each Meta server in production. This service runs on over 5 million servers and continues to be utilized at Meta. Since Meta, Thiara has been working at Netflix as a Senior CDN Reliability engineer, and now, Cloud Gaming SRE Manager. When incidents occur and Netflix's systems do not behave as expected, Thiara can be found working and engaging the necessary teams to remediate these issues.

Andrew Espira - Platform and Site Reliability Engineer\, Founding Engineer kustode ML-Powered Predictive SRE: Using Behavioral Signals to Prevent Cluster Inefficiencies Before They Impact Production SREs managing ML clusters often discover resource inefficiencies and queue bottlenecks only after they've impacted production services. This talk presents a machine learning approach to predict these issues before they occur, transforming SRE from reactive firefighting to proactive system optimization. We demonstrate how to build predictive models using production cluster traces that identify two critical failure modes: (1) GPU under-utilization relative to requested resources, and (2) abnormal queue wait times that indicate impending service degradation. The SRE practitioners will learn how to extract early warning indicators from standard cluster logs, build ML models that provide actionable confidence scores for operational decisions, and take practical steps to integrate predictive analytics into existing SRE toolchains to achieve 50%+ reduction in resource waste and queue-related incidents This talk bridges the gap between traditional SRE observability and modern predictive analytics, showing how teams can evolve from reactive monitoring to intelligent, forward-looking reliability engineering" Andrew has over 8 years of experience architecting and maintaining large-scale distributed systems. He is the Founding Engineer of Kustode (kustode.com), where he develops cutting-edge reliability and observability solutions for modern infrastructure in the Insurance and health care solutions space. Currently pursuing graduate studies in Data Science at Saint Peter's University, he specializes in the intersection of reliability engineering and artificial intelligence. His research focuses on applying machine learning to operational challenges, with publications in peer-reviewed venues including ScienceDirect. He's passionate about making complex systems more predictable and maintainable through data-driven approaches. When not optimizing cluster performance or building the next generation of observability tools, Andrew enjoys contributing to open-source projects and mentoring early-career engineers in the SRE community.

Our Tech Talks series are for professional development and networking: no recruiters, sales or press please! Google is committed to providing a harassment-free and inclusive conference experience for everyone, and all participants must follow our Event Community Guidelines. The event will be photographed and video recorded.

Event space is limited! A reservation is required to attend. Reserve your spot today and share the event details with your SRE/DevOps friends 🙂

Join our virtual meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across Visual AI for Physical AI use cases.

Date, Time and Location

Dec 11, 2025 9:00-11:00 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

From Data to Open-World Autonomous Driving

Data is key for advances in machine learning, including mobile applications like robots and autonomous cars. To ensure reliable operation, occurring scenarios must be reflected by the underlying dataset. Since the open-world environments can contain unknown scenarios and novel objects, active learning from online data collection and handling of unknowns is required. In this talk we discuss different approach to address this real world requirements.

About the Speaker

Sebastian Schmidt is a PhD student at the Data Analytics and Machine Learning group at TU Munich and part of an Industrial PhD Program with the BMW research group. His work is mainly focused on Open-world active learning and perception for autonomous vehicles.

From Raw Sensor Data to Reliable Datasets: Physical AI in Practice

Modern mobility systems rely on massive, high-quality multimodal datasets — yet real-world data is messy. Misaligned sensors, inconsistent metadata, and uneven scenario coverage can slow development and lead to costly model failures. The Physical AI Workbench, built in collaboration between Voxel51 and NVIDIA, provides an automated and scalable pipeline for auditing, reconstructing, and enriching autonomous driving datasets.

In this talk, we’ll show how FiftyOne serves as the central interface for inspecting and validating sensor alignment, scene structure, and scenario diversity, while NVIDIA Neural Reconstruction (NuRec) enables physics-aware reconstruction directly from real-world captures. We’ll highlight how these capabilities support automated dataset quality checks, reduce manual review overhead, and streamline the creation of richer datasets for model training and evaluation.

Attendees will gain insight into how Physical AI workflows help mobility teams scale, improve dataset reliability, and accelerate iteration from data capture to model deployment — without rewriting their infrastructure.

About the Speaker

Daniel Gural leads technical partnerships at Voxel51, where he’s building the Physical AI Workbench, a platform that connects real-world sensor data with realistic simulation to help engineers better understand, validate, and improve their perception systems. With a background in developer relations and computer vision engineering,

Building Smarter AV Simulation with Neural Reconstruction and World Models

This talk explores how neural reconstruction and world models are coming together to create richer, more dynamic simulation for scalable autonomous vehicle development. We’ll look at the latest releases in 3D Gaussian splatting techniques and world reasoning and generation, as well as discuss how these technologies are advancing the deployment of autonomous driving stacks that can generalize to any environment. We’ll also cover NVIDIA open models, frameworks, and data to help kickstart your own development pipelines.

About the Speaker

Katie Washabaugh is NVIDIA’s Product Marketing Manager for Autonomous Vehicle Simulation, focusing on virtual solutions for real world mobility. A former journalist at publications such as Automotive News and MarketWatch, she joined the NVIDIA team in 2018 as Automotive Content Marketing Manager. Katie holds a B.A. in public policy from the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.

Relevance of Classical Algorithms in Modern Autonomous Driving Architectures

While modern autonomous driving systems increasingly rely on machine learning and deep neural networks, classical algorithms continue to play a foundational role in ensuring reliability, interpretability, and real-time performance. Techniques such as Kalman filtering, A* path planning, PID control, and SLAM remain integral to perception, localization, and decision-making modules. Their deterministic nature and lower computational overhead make them especially valuable in safety-critical scenarios and resource-constrained environments. This talk explores the enduring relevance of classical algorithms, their integration with learning-based methods, and their evolving scope in the context of next-generation autonomous vehicle architectures.

Prajwal Chinthoju is an Autonomous Driving Feature Development Engineer with a strong foundation in systems engineering, optimization, and intelligent mobility. I specialize in integrating classical algorithms with modern AI techniques to enhance perception, planning, and control in autonomous vehicle platforms.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Register for the Zoom

Date and Time

Dec 4, 2025 9:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Safety

This workshop introduces a unified framework for evaluating how vision-language models handle driving safety. Using an enhanced BDDOIA dataset with scene, weather, and action labels, we benchmark models like Gemini, FastVLM, and Qwen within FiftyOne. Our results show consistent blind spots where models misjudge unsafe situations, highlighting the need for safer and more interpretable AI systems for autonomous driving.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow\, Docker\, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer\, moved into AI\, led teams\, and served as CTO. Today\, I connect code and community to build open\, production-ready AI — making technology simple\, accessible\, and reliable.

TrueRice: AI-Powered Visual Quality Control for Rice Grains and Beyond at Scale

Agriculture remains one of the most under-digitized industries, yet grain quality control defines pricing, trust, and livelihoods for millions. TrueRice is an AI-powered analyzer that turns a flatbed scanner into a high-precision, 30-second QC engine, replacing the 2+ hours and subjectivity of manual quality inspection.

Built on a state-of-the-art 8K image processing pipeline with SAHI (Slicing Aided Hyper Inference), it detects fine-grained kernel defects at scale with high accuracy across grain size, shape, breakage, discoloration, and chalkiness. Now being extended to maize and coffee, TrueRice showcases how cross-crop transfer learning and frugal AI engineering can scale precision QC for farmers, millers, and exporters. This talk will cover the design principles, model architecture choices, and a live demonstration, while addressing challenges in data variability, regulatory standards, and cross-crop adaptation.

About the Speaker

Sai Jeevan Puchakayala is an Interdisciplinary AI/ML Consultant, Researcher, and Tech Lead at Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) India, where he drives development of applied AI solutions for agriculture, climate resilience, and sustainability. He led the engineering of TrueRice, an award-winning grain quality analyzer that won India’s first International Agri Hackathon 2025.

WeedNet: A Foundation Model Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early and accurate weed identification is critical for effective management, yet current AI-based approaches face challenges due to limited expert-verified datasets and the high variability in weed morphology across species and growth stages. We present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model designed to recognize a wide range of species, including noxious and invasive plants. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time pipeline that integrates self-supervised pretraining, fine-tuning, and trustworthiness strategies to improve both accuracy and reliability.

Building on this foundation, we introduce a Global-to-Local strategy: while the Global WeedNet model provides broad generalization, we fine-tune local variants such as Iowa WeedNet to target region-specific weed communities in the U.S. Midwest. Our evaluation addresses both intra-species diversity (different growth stages) and inter-species similarity (look-alike species), ensuring robust performance under real-world variability. We further validate WeedNet on images captured by drones and ground rovers, demonstrating its potential for deployment in robotic platforms. Beyond field applications, we integrate a conversational AI to enable practical decision-support tools for farmers, agronomists, researchers, and land managers worldwide. These advances position WeedNet as a foundational model for intelligent, scalable, and regionally adaptable weed management and ecological conservation.

About the Speaker

Timilehin Ayanlade is a Ph.D. candidate in the Self-aware Complex Systems Laboratory at Iowa State University, where his research focuses on developing machine learning and computer vision methods for agricultural applications. His work integrates multimodal data across ground-based sensing, UAV, and satellite with advanced AI models to tackle challenges in weed identification, crop monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Memory Matters: Early Alzheimer’s Detection with AI-Powered Mobile Tools

Advancements in artificial intelligence and mobile technology are transforming the landscape of neurodegenerative disease detection, offering new hope for early intervention in Alzheimer’s. By integrating machine learning algorithms with everyday mobile devices, we are entering a new era of accessible, scalable, and non-invasive tools for early Alzheimer’s detection In this talk, we’ll cover the potential of AI in health care systems, ethical considerations, plus an architecture, model, datasets and framework deep dive.

About the Speaker

Reetam Biswas has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry as a software architect, currently working on AI.

Speakers: Greg Phips & Alex Badiu Start Date: Thu, Nov 27th 2025 · 7:00 PM EEST (5:00 PM GMT) Language: ENGLISH Location: Online (link visible for attendees) Description:

Transform documentation from perceived overhead into a strategic advantage for exceptional data visualization

At the end of the Meetup we'll have a Raffle with prizes offered by EDNA: 1 FREE one-year access Licenses on EDNA Platform for one lucky winner from the Live attendees !

Speaker: Greg Philps Power BI Specialist \| Enterprise DNA Expert \| Deneb Community Expert

One of the top Microsoft Power BI developers in the world, Greg is a noted expert and author of learning materials in both Power BI best practices and use of the Deneb custom visual within Power BI. Prior to his Power BI career, Greg spent over twenty years’ architecting and managing robust and reliable solutions for both new and existing software applications. Committed to the engineering of software requirements from their initial development to their on-going management through the product lifecycle, with special emphases on their validation and testability. An excellent communicator with particular skills at clarifying customers’ needs, reducing expectation gaps, and interpreting technical information for non-technical audiences. Authored two courses (as of August 2025) for Power BI as part of Enterprise DNA’s member offerings: • Power BI Report Development Best Practices Checklist • Introduction to the Deneb custom visual in Power BI (available to Enterprise DNA members) Collaborating with Alex Badiu on a multi-part GitHub and LinkedIn series on Power BI documentation (20 issues published as of August 2025). Authored a ten-part series for LinkedIn on common reporting effort problems and solutions (November 2024). Authored a ten-part carousel series for LinkedIn on the use of the Deneb custom visual within Power BI (September 2023).

Connect with Greg here:

• LinkedIn
• https://github.com/alexbadiu-insightsinmotion/PBI-Documentation/tree/main

Speaker: Alex Badiu Microsoft MVP

Power BI MVP (2025-2026) Fabric / Power BI Super User (2024-2025) Head of Business Analytics at Décilia (Paris, France) Online course author: "Data Storytelling and User-Centered Design in Power BI“ (April 2022) Technical reviewer: "Power Apps Tips, Tricks and Best Practices" by Andrea Pinillos and Tim Weinzapfel ( Nov 2024)

Connect with Alex here:

• LinkedIn
• https://github.com/alexbadiu-insightsinmotion/PBI-Documentation/tree/main ;
• https://insightsinmotion.eu/

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Join the virtual Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Oct 30, 2025 9 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems. Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.