talk-data.com

To be clear - I'm not saying that analytics and data engineering are a fad. I'm not saying the data teams are doomed to fade away, or that the old fundamentals of data modeling are wrong, or that the urge to quantify everything is a mistake. I'm saying that things seem pretty good, right now. But, you know. Like Charles Schwab constantly says, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So someone else might say all of that in the future - because, as John Maynard Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Join us for day one of a series of virtual events to hear talks from experts on the latest developments at the intersection of Visual AI in Agriculture.

Date and Time Oct 15 at 9 AM Pacific

Location Virtual. Register for the Zoom.

Paved2Paradise: Scalable LiDAR Simulation for Real-World Perception

Training robust perception models for robotics and autonomy often requires massive, diverse 3D datasets. But collecting and annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds at scale is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when high-quality labels are needed. Paved2Paradise introduces a cost-effective alternative: a scalable LiDAR simulation pipeline that generates realistic, fully annotated datasets with minimal human labeling effort.

The key idea is to “factor the real world” by separately capturing background scans (e.g., fields, roads, construction sites) and object scans (e.g., vehicles, people, machinery). By intelligently combining these two sources, Paved2Paradise can synthesize a combinatorially large set of diverse training scenes. The pipeline involves four steps: (1) collecting extensive background LiDAR scans, (2) recording high-resolution scans of target objects under controlled conditions, (3) inserting objects into backgrounds with physically consistent placement and occlusion, and (4) simulating LiDAR geometry to ensure realism.

Experiments show that models trained on Paved2Paradise-generated data transfer effectively to the real world, achieving strong detection performance with far less manual annotation compared to conventional dataset collection. The approach is not only cost-efficient, but also flexible—allowing practitioners to easily expand to new object classes or domains by swapping in new background or object scans. For ML practitioners working in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical perception, Paved2Paradise highlights a practical path toward scaling training data without scaling costs. It bridges the gap between simulation and real-world performance, enabling faster iteration and more reliable deployment of perception models.

About the Speaker

Michael A. Alcorn is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at John Deere\, where he develops deep learning models for LiDAR and RGB perception in safety-critical\, real-time systems. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University\, with a dissertation on improving computer vision and spatiotemporal deep neural networks\, and also holds a Graduate Minor in Mathematics. Michael’s research has been cited by researchers at DeepMind\, Google\, Meta\, Microsoft\, and OpenAI\, among others\, and his (batter\|pitcher)2vec paper was a prize-winner at the 2018 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He has also contributed machine learning code to scikit-learn and Apache Solr\, and his GitHub repositories—which have collectively received over 2\,100 stars—have served as starting points for research and production code at many different organizations.

MothBox: inexpensive, open-source, automated insect monitor

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer will talk about the design of an exciting new open source science tool, The Mothbox. The Mothbox is an award winning project for broad scale monitoring of insects for biodiversity. It's a low cost device developed in harsh Panamanian jungles which takes super high resolution photos to then automatically ID the levels of biodiversity in forests and agriculture. After thousands of insect observations and hundreds of deployments in Panama, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the US, we are now developing a new, manufacturable version to share this important tool worldwide. We will discuss the development of this device in the jungles of Panama and its importance to studying biodiversity worldwide.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andy Quitmeyer designs new ways to interact with the natural world. He has worked with large organizations like Cartoon Network, IDEO, and the Smithsonian, taught as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore, and even had his research turned into a (silly) television series called “Hacking the Wild,” distributed by Discovery Networks.

Now, he spends most of his time volunteering with smaller organizations, and recently founded the field-station makerspace, Digital Naturalism Laboratories. In the rainforest of Gamboa, Panama, Dinalab blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. He currently also advises students as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Foundation Models for Visual AI in Agriculture

Foundation models have enabled a new way to address tasks, by benefitting from emerging capabilities in a zero-shot manner. In this talk I will discuss recent research on enabling visual AI in a zero-shot manner and via fine-tuning. Specifically, I will discuss joint work on RELOCATE, a simple training-free baseline designed to perform the challenging task of visual query localization in long videos.

To eliminate the need for task-specific training and efficiently handle long videos, RELOCATE leverages a region-based representation derived from pretrained vision models. I will also discuss joint work on enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to correctly answer prompts that require a holistic spatio-temporal understanding: MLLMs struggle to answer prompts that refer to 1) the entirety of an environment that an agent equipped with an MLLM can operate in; and simultaneously also refer to 2) recent actions that just happened and are encoded in a video clip.

However, such a holistic spatio-temporal understanding is important for agents operating in the real world. Our solution involves development of a dedicated data collection pipeline and fine-tuning of an MLLM equipped with projectors to improve both spatial understanding of an environment and temporal understanding of recent observations.

About the Speaker

Alex Schwing is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working with talented students on artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision topics. He received his B.S. and diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2014. Afterwards he joined University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow until 2016.

His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, generative AI, and computer vision, where he has co-authored numerous papers on topics in scene understanding, inference and learning algorithms, deep learning, image and language processing, and generative modeling. His PhD thesis was awarded an ETH medal and his team’s research was awarded an NSF CAREER award.

Beyond the Lab: Real-World Anomaly Detection for Agricultural Computer Vision

Anomaly detection is transforming manufacturing and surveillance, but what about agriculture? Can AI actually detect plant diseases and pest damage early enough to make a difference? This talk demonstrates how anomaly detection identifies and localizes crop problems using coffee leaf health as our primary example. We'll start with the foundational theory, then examine how these models detect rust and miner damage in leaf imagery.

The session includes a comprehensive hands-on workflow using the open-source FiftyOne computer vision toolkit, covering dataset curation, patch extraction, model training, and result visualization. You'll gain both theoretical understanding of anomaly detection in computer vision and practical experience applying these techniques to agricultural challenges and other domains.

About the Speaker

Paula Ramos has a PhD in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with more than 20 years of experience in the technological field. She has been developing novel integrated engineering technologies, mainly in Computer Vision, robotics, and Machine Learning applied to agriculture, since the early 2000s in Colombia.

Thinking about swapping your 9‑to‑5 for client work, but worried that a long German–style notice period will kill your chances?  In this live interview, seven‑year data‑freelance veteran Dimitri walks through his experience of taking his freelance career to the next level.

About the Speaker: Dimitri Visnadi is an independent data consultant with a focus on data strategy. He has been consulting companies leading the marketing data space such as Unilever, Ferrero, Heineken, and Red Bull.

He has lived and worked in 6 countries across Europe in both corporate and startup organizations. He was part of data departments at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and a Google partnered consulting firm where he was working on data products and strategy.

Having received a Masters in Business Analytics with Computer Science from University College London and a Bachelor in Business Administration from John Cabot University, Dimitri still has close ties to academia and holds a mentor position in entrepreneurship at both institutions. 🕒 TIMECODES00:00 Dimitri’s journey from corporate to freelance data specialist05:41 Job tenure trends, tech career shifts, and freelance types10:50 Freelancing challenges, success, and finding clients17:33 Freelance market trends and Dimitri’s job board23:51 Starting points, top freelance skills, and market insights32:48 Building a lifestyle business: scaling and work-life balance45:30 Data Freelancer course and marketing for freelancers48:33 Subscription services and managing client relationships56:47 Pricing models and transitioning advice1:01:02 Notice periods, networking, and risks in freelancing transition 🔗 CONNECT WITH DataTalksClub Join the community - https://datatalks.club/slack.html Subscribe to our Google calendar to have all our events in your calendar - https://calendar.google.com/calendar/... Check other upcoming events - https://lu.ma/dtc-events LinkedIn - / datatalks-club
Twitter - / datatalksclub
Website - https://datatalks.club/ 🔗 CONNECT WITH DIMITRI Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/visnadi/

In this episode, we dive into a genetic mystery: how can a single gene in plant-parasitic nematodes have thousands of alleles? This study unravels the bizarre behaviour of HYP effectors — genes that help nematodes infect plants but defy traditional genetics.

Using CRISPR, long-read sequencing, and clever maths, the researchers reveal:

​How the HYP gene rearranges motifs in its hyper-variable domain (HVD) with flawless precision​That most nematodes appear homozygous, despite the population showing extreme diversity​A proposed mechanism called HVD editing — a form of locus-specific somatic genome editing​Why this mirrors the way our immune system reshuffles antibody genes

This isn’t just about plant pests — it’s a rare glimpse at real-time genome innovation, where diversity is generated with intent, not random chance.

📖 Based on the research article: “A gene with a thousand alleles: The hyper-variable effectors of plant-parasitic nematodes” Unnati Sonawala, Helen Beasley, Peter Thorpe, Kyriakos Varypatakis, Beatrice Senatori, John T. Jones, Lida Derevnina & Sebastian Eves-van den Akker Published in Cell Genomics (2024). 🔗 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2024.100580

🎧 Subscribe to the WoRM Podcast for more strange and spectacular tales of genome biology.

This podcast is generated with artificial intelligence and curated by Veeren. If you’d like your publication featured on the show, please get in touch.

📩 More info: 🔗 ⁠⁠www.veerenchauhan.com⁠⁠ 📧 [email protected]

Supported by Our Partners •⁠ CodeRabbit⁠⁠ — Cut code review time and bugs in half. Use the code PRAGMATIC to get one month free. •⁠ Modal⁠ — The cloud platform for building AI applications. — How will AI tools change software engineering? Tools like Cursor, Windsurf and Copilot are getting better at autocomplete, generating tests and documentation. But what is changing, when it comes to software design? Stanford professor John Ousterhout thinks not much. In fact, he believes that great software design is becoming even more important as AI tools become more capable in generating code.  In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, John joins me to talk about why design still matters and how most teams struggle to get it right. We dive into his book A Philosophy of Software Design, unpack the difference between top-down and bottom-up approaches, and explore why some popular advice, like writing short methods or relying heavily on TDD, does not hold up, according to John. We also explore:  • The differences between working in industry vs. academia  • Why John believes software design will become more important as AI capabilities expand • The top-down and bottoms-up design approaches – and why you should use both • John’s “design it twice” principle • Why deep modules are essential for good software design  • Best practices for special cases and exceptions • The undervalued trait of empathy in design thinking • Why John advocates for doing some design upfront • John’s criticisms of the single-responsibility principle, TDD, and why he’s a fan of well-written comments  • And much more! As a fun fact: when we recorded this podcast, John was busy contributing to the Linux kernel: adding support to the Homa Transport Protocol – a protocol invented by one of his PhD students. John wanted to make this protocol available more widely, and is putting in the work to do so. What a legend! (We previously covered how Linux is built and how to contribute to the Linux kernel) — Timestamps (00:00) Intro  (02:00) Why John transitioned back to academia (03:47) Working in academia vs. industry  (07:20) Tactical tornadoes vs. 10x engineers (11:59) Long-term impact of AI-assisted coding (14:24) An overview of software design (15:28) Why TDD and Design Patterns are less popular now  (17:04) Two general approaches to designing software  (18:56) Two ways to deal with complexity  (19:56) A case for not going with your first idea  (23:24) How Uber used design docs (26:44) Deep modules vs. shallow modules (28:25) Best practices for error handling (33:31) The role of empathy in the design process (36:15) How John uses design reviews  (38:10) The value of in-person planning and using old-school whiteboards  (39:50) Leading a planning argument session and the places it works best (42:20) The value of doing some design upfront  (46:12) Why John wrote A Philosophy of Software of Design  (48:40) An overview of John’s class at Stanford (52:20) A tough learning from early in Gergely’s career  (55:48) Why John disagrees with Robert Martin on short methods (1:10:40) John’s current coding project in the Linux Kernel  (1:14:13) Updates to A Philosophy of Software Design in the second edition (1:19:12) Rapid fire round (1:01:08) John’s criticisms of TDD and what he favors instead  (1:05:30) Why John supports the use of comments and how to use them correctly (1:09:20) How John uses ChatGPT to help explain code in the Linux Kernel — The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode: • Engineering Planning with RFCs, Design Documents and ADRs • Paying down tech debt • Software architect archetypes • Building Bluesky: a distributed social network — See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠ — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe

Due to the speaker becoming unavailable, the webinar “(CS)²AI Online™ Seminar: Ditching Misconceptions: Embracing Proactive OT Discovery and Remediation to Reduce Business Risk” at: Wed, Dec 11, 2024 1:00 PM EST - Wed, Dec 11, 2024 2:30 PM EST has been cancelled.

Since our recent Symposium on ICS/OT Cybersecurity for the Manufacturing Sector was extremely well received, we will be airing a recording of that 4.5 hour event on this Wednesday. We do hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity before the recording goes into the members-only vault. Register here:https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4714096074753788000?source=12112024meetupevent

The manufacturing sector is the backbone of economies worldwide, providing jobs, innovation, and essential goods. However, as technology advances, so do the threats that can disrupt this vital industry. To address these challenges and develop proactive strategies, we invite you to this (CS)²AI Online™ Symposium on Securing the Manufacturing Sector.

Event Agenda

1:00 PM Eastern Session 1: Securing the Core: NIS2 Compliance for Multi-National Manufacturing Organizations Featuring Hamish Wishart (Senior Consultant Cyber Security at KPMG) In the increasingly vulnerable cybersecurity landscape, the manufacturing sector stands as a key target for security incidents. Upholding NIS2 compliance is not just a necessity— it's a strategic advantage. This talk offers exclusive insights into driving NIS2 compliance in a multi-national manufacturing environment where organizations must manage facilities in multiple EU Member States. You will learn tailored collaboration strategies with site personnel for comprehensive risk ownership and effective incident detection and response. We will delve into 'quick wins' for immediate security boosts and outline a strategic long-term roadmap. This session aims to equip attendees with the tools needed to bolster OT security and transform what we see as the common pain points into areas of strength.

2:10 PM Eastern Session 2: Asset Owners Panel Discussion Featuring

• Yosef Beck (VP, Cyber Security at CRH)
• Jonas Rendahl (CISO at Aurobay)

Acquire valuable insights from cybersecurity leaders who serve asset owner operations in the manufacturing sector and ask them your questions! 3:10 PM Eastern Session 3: Tales from the Crypt Featuring Aamir Lakhani (Global Security Strategist and Researcher at Fortinet) Attacks on operational technology (OT) — the systems controlling industrial equipment, processes, and events —have leaped from Hollywood screens into reality. What once seemed like special-effects fiction in disaster movies about nuclear meltdowns, power grid collapses, and poisoned water systems is now a genuine threat. OT and manufacturing attacks are not new, but their impact on modern life is more significant than ever.

4:10 PM Eastern Session 4: A Random Walk Through a ~~Million~~ Billion IoT/OT Things A conversation with millions of researched Cyber-Physical Systems… Featuring John Terrill (CISO at Phosphorus Cybersecurity) With billions of IoT and OT devices powering manufacturing and industrial operations today, the xTended Internet of Things (xIoT) now surpasses traditional endpoints by an order of magnitude. Despite their critical roles, many of these IoT and OT Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) remain overlooked and unsecured—operating with default or weak credentials, outdated firmware, insecure configurations, and an end-of-life state. This creates a vast and vulnerable attack surface that threat actors increasingly target to disrupt operations, exfiltrate data, or stage sophisticated ransomware attacks. In this session, we’ll take a comprehensive journey through the world of IoT and OT/ICS devices, uncovering what we’ve learned over the years about the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the immense benefits of connected devices. From outdated security hygiene to device-specific weaknesses across diverse environments, we’ll explore key insights and real-world examples that highlight the unique challenges of securing these systems. The session will also delve into the anatomy of OT and OT-adjacent IoT cyberattacks, detailing how attackers exploit these devices to achieve malicious goals. A live hacking demonstration will showcase the methods used to compromise common, yet mission-critical, devices — emphasizing the importance of proactive security measures to disappoint bad actors. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the scope and state of this attack surface, the critical role IoT and OT security plays in protecting the modern industrial landscape, and actionable steps that can be taken to strengthen their xIoT security posture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becoming a paid member is quick and easy (and helps us keep offering these educational opportunities!). Please join now! https://www.cs2ai.org/plans-pricing

## All past seminars and symposiums are available to paid CS2AI.ORG members. Check out the Resources area of our website in the Members Portal https://www.cs2ai.org/

## Certificates for Professional Development/Continuing Education Units (PDUs/CEUs) are available for all registered individuals who attend at least one hour of the event.

## If you're interested in speaking at a future (CS)2AI event\, having your organization become a Strategic Alliance Partner\, or engaging in any of the other ways available\, please contact us on our https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved

## Please note that (CS)2AI ONLINE events are provided free of charge as educational career development content through the support of our paid members and the generous contributions of our corporate Strategic Alliance Partners. Contact information used in registering for our directly supported seminars may be shared with sponsors funding those specific events. Unless noted on the Gotowebinar registration page, all events are open for direct funding support.

Due to the speaker becoming unavailable, the webinar “(CS)²AI Online™ Seminar: Ditching Misconceptions: Embracing Proactive OT Discovery and Remediation to Reduce Business Risk” at: Wed, Dec 11, 2024 1:00 PM EST - Wed, Dec 11, 2024 2:30 PM EST has been cancelled.

Since our recent Symposium on ICS/OT Cybersecurity for the Manufacturing Sector was extremely well received, we will be airing a recording of that 4.5 hour event on this Wednesday. We do hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity before the recording goes into the members-only vault. Register here:https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4714096074753788000?source=12112024meetupevent

The manufacturing sector is the backbone of economies worldwide, providing jobs, innovation, and essential goods. However, as technology advances, so do the threats that can disrupt this vital industry. To address these challenges and develop proactive strategies, we invite you to this (CS)²AI Online™ Symposium on Securing the Manufacturing Sector.

Event Agenda

1:00 PM Eastern Session 1: Securing the Core: NIS2 Compliance for Multi-National Manufacturing Organizations Featuring Hamish Wishart (Senior Consultant Cyber Security at KPMG) In the increasingly vulnerable cybersecurity landscape, the manufacturing sector stands as a key target for security incidents. Upholding NIS2 compliance is not just a necessity— it's a strategic advantage. This talk offers exclusive insights into driving NIS2 compliance in a multi-national manufacturing environment where organizations must manage facilities in multiple EU Member States. You will learn tailored collaboration strategies with site personnel for comprehensive risk ownership and effective incident detection and response. We will delve into 'quick wins' for immediate security boosts and outline a strategic long-term roadmap. This session aims to equip attendees with the tools needed to bolster OT security and transform what we see as the common pain points into areas of strength.

2:10 PM Eastern Session 2: Asset Owners Panel Discussion Featuring

• Yosef Beck (VP, Cyber Security at CRH)
• Jonas Rendahl (CISO at Aurobay)

Acquire valuable insights from cybersecurity leaders who serve asset owner operations in the manufacturing sector and ask them your questions! 3:10 PM Eastern Session 3: Tales from the Crypt Featuring Aamir Lakhani (Global Security Strategist and Researcher at Fortinet) Attacks on operational technology (OT) — the systems controlling industrial equipment, processes, and events —have leaped from Hollywood screens into reality. What once seemed like special-effects fiction in disaster movies about nuclear meltdowns, power grid collapses, and poisoned water systems is now a genuine threat. OT and manufacturing attacks are not new, but their impact on modern life is more significant than ever.

4:10 PM Eastern Session 4: A Random Walk Through a ~~Million~~ Billion IoT/OT Things A conversation with millions of researched Cyber-Physical Systems… Featuring John Terrill (CISO at Phosphorus Cybersecurity) With billions of IoT and OT devices powering manufacturing and industrial operations today, the xTended Internet of Things (xIoT) now surpasses traditional endpoints by an order of magnitude. Despite their critical roles, many of these IoT and OT Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) remain overlooked and unsecured—operating with default or weak credentials, outdated firmware, insecure configurations, and an end-of-life state. This creates a vast and vulnerable attack surface that threat actors increasingly target to disrupt operations, exfiltrate data, or stage sophisticated ransomware attacks. In this session, we’ll take a comprehensive journey through the world of IoT and OT/ICS devices, uncovering what we’ve learned over the years about the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the immense benefits of connected devices. From outdated security hygiene to device-specific weaknesses across diverse environments, we’ll explore key insights and real-world examples that highlight the unique challenges of securing these systems. The session will also delve into the anatomy of OT and OT-adjacent IoT cyberattacks, detailing how attackers exploit these devices to achieve malicious goals. A live hacking demonstration will showcase the methods used to compromise common, yet mission-critical, devices — emphasizing the importance of proactive security measures to disappoint bad actors. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the scope and state of this attack surface, the critical role IoT and OT security plays in protecting the modern industrial landscape, and actionable steps that can be taken to strengthen their xIoT security posture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becoming a paid member is quick and easy (and helps us keep offering these educational opportunities!). Please join now! https://www.cs2ai.org/plans-pricing

## All past seminars and symposiums are available to paid CS2AI.ORG members. Check out the Resources area of our website in the Members Portal https://www.cs2ai.org/

## Certificates for Professional Development/Continuing Education Units (PDUs/CEUs) are available for all registered individuals who attend at least one hour of the event.

## If you're interested in speaking at a future (CS)2AI event\, having your organization become a Strategic Alliance Partner\, or engaging in any of the other ways available\, please contact us on our https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved

## Please note that (CS)2AI ONLINE events are provided free of charge as educational career development content through the support of our paid members and the generous contributions of our corporate Strategic Alliance Partners. Contact information used in registering for our directly supported seminars may be shared with sponsors funding those specific events. Unless noted on the Gotowebinar registration page, all events are open for direct funding support.

Due to the speaker becoming unavailable, the webinar “(CS)²AI Online™ Seminar: Ditching Misconceptions: Embracing Proactive OT Discovery and Remediation to Reduce Business Risk” at: Wed, Dec 11, 2024 1:00 PM EST - Wed, Dec 11, 2024 2:30 PM EST has been cancelled.

Since our recent Symposium on ICS/OT Cybersecurity for the Manufacturing Sector was extremely well received, we will be airing a recording of that 4.5 hour event on this Wednesday. We do hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity before the recording goes into the members-only vault. Register here:https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4714096074753788000?source=12112024meetupevent

The manufacturing sector is the backbone of economies worldwide, providing jobs, innovation, and essential goods. However, as technology advances, so do the threats that can disrupt this vital industry. To address these challenges and develop proactive strategies, we invite you to this (CS)²AI Online™ Symposium on Securing the Manufacturing Sector.

Event Agenda

1:00 PM Eastern Session 1: Securing the Core: NIS2 Compliance for Multi-National Manufacturing Organizations Featuring Hamish Wishart (Senior Consultant Cyber Security at KPMG) In the increasingly vulnerable cybersecurity landscape, the manufacturing sector stands as a key target for security incidents. Upholding NIS2 compliance is not just a necessity— it's a strategic advantage. This talk offers exclusive insights into driving NIS2 compliance in a multi-national manufacturing environment where organizations must manage facilities in multiple EU Member States. You will learn tailored collaboration strategies with site personnel for comprehensive risk ownership and effective incident detection and response. We will delve into 'quick wins' for immediate security boosts and outline a strategic long-term roadmap. This session aims to equip attendees with the tools needed to bolster OT security and transform what we see as the common pain points into areas of strength.

2:10 PM Eastern Session 2: Asset Owners Panel Discussion Featuring

• Yosef Beck (VP, Cyber Security at CRH)
• Jonas Rendahl (CISO at Aurobay)

Acquire valuable insights from cybersecurity leaders who serve asset owner operations in the manufacturing sector and ask them your questions! 3:10 PM Eastern Session 3: Tales from the Crypt Featuring Aamir Lakhani (Global Security Strategist and Researcher at Fortinet) Attacks on operational technology (OT) — the systems controlling industrial equipment, processes, and events —have leaped from Hollywood screens into reality. What once seemed like special-effects fiction in disaster movies about nuclear meltdowns, power grid collapses, and poisoned water systems is now a genuine threat. OT and manufacturing attacks are not new, but their impact on modern life is more significant than ever.

4:10 PM Eastern Session 4: A Random Walk Through a ~~Million~~ Billion IoT/OT Things A conversation with millions of researched Cyber-Physical Systems… Featuring John Terrill (CISO at Phosphorus Cybersecurity) With billions of IoT and OT devices powering manufacturing and industrial operations today, the xTended Internet of Things (xIoT) now surpasses traditional endpoints by an order of magnitude. Despite their critical roles, many of these IoT and OT Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) remain overlooked and unsecured—operating with default or weak credentials, outdated firmware, insecure configurations, and an end-of-life state. This creates a vast and vulnerable attack surface that threat actors increasingly target to disrupt operations, exfiltrate data, or stage sophisticated ransomware attacks. In this session, we’ll take a comprehensive journey through the world of IoT and OT/ICS devices, uncovering what we’ve learned over the years about the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the immense benefits of connected devices. From outdated security hygiene to device-specific weaknesses across diverse environments, we’ll explore key insights and real-world examples that highlight the unique challenges of securing these systems. The session will also delve into the anatomy of OT and OT-adjacent IoT cyberattacks, detailing how attackers exploit these devices to achieve malicious goals. A live hacking demonstration will showcase the methods used to compromise common, yet mission-critical, devices — emphasizing the importance of proactive security measures to disappoint bad actors. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the scope and state of this attack surface, the critical role IoT and OT security plays in protecting the modern industrial landscape, and actionable steps that can be taken to strengthen their xIoT security posture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becoming a paid member is quick and easy (and helps us keep offering these educational opportunities!). Please join now! https://www.cs2ai.org/plans-pricing

## All past seminars and symposiums are available to paid CS2AI.ORG members. Check out the Resources area of our website in the Members Portal https://www.cs2ai.org/

## Certificates for Professional Development/Continuing Education Units (PDUs/CEUs) are available for all registered individuals who attend at least one hour of the event.

## If you're interested in speaking at a future (CS)2AI event\, having your organization become a Strategic Alliance Partner\, or engaging in any of the other ways available\, please contact us on our https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved

## Please note that (CS)2AI ONLINE events are provided free of charge as educational career development content through the support of our paid members and the generous contributions of our corporate Strategic Alliance Partners. Contact information used in registering for our directly supported seminars may be shared with sponsors funding those specific events. Unless noted on the Gotowebinar registration page, all events are open for direct funding support.

It's time for the last of our big, half-day events of 2024! Be sure to reserve your seat in our December 4th event with over six speakers, including a panel of senior cyber decision makers from global manufacturing firms! https://events.zoom.us/ev/Ap4VQeoyAjwH8lScyZJG9Ys3Ac4gqTEjC6h4UEb_jIuQ4z_xALZd\~Aq-Nr7MNBpJbnKKHMa_-j-2q9mHiiKuCV3Pv3KVGd6oxzJ4Ml4sbPYtpCMwzevX2DOVhCV-xI4WzY4td9LgDwr8UFg

Four and a half hours of educational content and discussion, with the opportunity to ask these cyber security leaders your questions (and get 4 Continuing Educational Units of credit!) Come for part or come for all, but be sure not to miss out!

This is also the event in which we are awarding the 2024 CS2AI Passport Awards, in addition to our regular Quality Question Awards!

Event Agenda

1:00 PM Eastern Session 1: Securing the Core: NIS2 Compliance for Multi-National Manufacturing Organizations Featuring Hamish Wishart (Senior Consultant Cyber Security at KPMG) In the increasingly vulnerable cybersecurity landscape, the manufacturing sector stands as a key target for security incidents. Upholding NIS2 compliance is not just a necessity— it's a strategic advantage. This talk offers exclusive insights into driving NIS2 compliance in a multi-national manufacturing environment where organizations must manage facilities in multiple EU Member States. You will learn tailored collaboration strategies with site personnel for comprehensive risk ownership and effective incident detection and response. We will delve into 'quick wins' for immediate security boosts and outline a strategic long-term roadmap. This session aims to equip attendees with the tools needed to bolster OT security and transform what we see as the common pain points into areas of strength.

2:10 PM Eastern Session 2: Asset Owners Panel Discussion Featuring

• Yosef Beck (VP, Cyber Security at CRH)
• Jonas Rendahl (CISO at Aurobay)

Acquire valuable insights from cybersecurity leaders who serve asset owner operations in the manufacturing sector and ask them your questions!

3:10 PM Eastern Session 3: Tales from the Crypt Featuring Aamir Lakhani (Global Security Strategist and Researcher at Fortinet) Attacks on operational technology (OT) — the systems controlling industrial equipment, processes, and events —have leaped from Hollywood screens into reality. What once seemed like special-effects fiction in disaster movies about nuclear meltdowns, power grid collapses, and poisoned water systems is now a genuine threat. OT and manufacturing attacks are not new, but their impact on modern life is more significant than ever.

4:10 PM Eastern Session 4: A Random Walk Through a ~~Million~~ Billion IoT/OT Things A conversation with millions of researched Cyber-Physical Systems… Featuring John Terrill (CISO at Phosphorus Cybersecurity) With billions of IoT and OT devices powering manufacturing and industrial operations today, the xTended Internet of Things (xIoT) now surpasses traditional endpoints by an order of magnitude. Despite their critical roles, many of these IoT and OT Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) remain overlooked and unsecured—operating with default or weak credentials, outdated firmware, insecure configurations, and an end-of-life state. This creates a vast and vulnerable attack surface that threat actors increasingly target to disrupt operations, exfiltrate data, or stage sophisticated ransomware attacks.

In this session, we’ll take a comprehensive journey through the world of IoT and OT/ICS devices, uncovering what we’ve learned over the years about the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the immense benefits of connected devices. From outdated security hygiene to device-specific weaknesses across diverse environments, we’ll explore key insights and real-world examples that highlight the unique challenges of securing these systems.

The session will also delve into the anatomy of OT and OT-adjacent IoT cyberattacks, detailing how attackers exploit these devices to achieve malicious goals. A live hacking demonstration will showcase the methods used to compromise common, yet mission-critical, devices — emphasizing the importance of proactive security measures to disappoint bad actors.

Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the scope and state of this attack surface, the critical role IoT and OT security plays in protecting the modern industrial landscape, and actionable steps that can be taken to strengthen their xIoT security posture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becoming a paid member is quick and easy (and helps us keep offering these educational opportunities!). Please join now! https://www.cs2ai.org/plans-pricing

## All past seminars and symposiums are available to paid CS2AI.ORG members. Check out the Resources area of our website in the Members Portal https://www.cs2ai.org/

## Certificates for Professional Development/Continuing Education Units (PDUs/CEUs) are available for all registered individuals who attend at least one hour of the event.

## If you're interested in speaking at a future (CS)2AI event\, having your organization become a Strategic Alliance Partner\, or engaging in any of the other ways available\, please contact us on our https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved

## Please note that (CS)2AI ONLINE events are provided free of charge as educational career development content through the support of our paid members and the generous contributions of our corporate Strategic Alliance Partners. Contact information used in registering for our directly supported seminars may be shared with sponsors funding those specific events. Unless noted on the Gotowebinar registration page, all events are open for direct funding support.

It's time for the last of our big, half-day events of 2024! Be sure to reserve your seat in our December 4th event with over six speakers, including a panel of senior cyber decision makers from global manufacturing firms! https://events.zoom.us/ev/Ap4VQeoyAjwH8lScyZJG9Ys3Ac4gqTEjC6h4UEb_jIuQ4z_xALZd\~Aq-Nr7MNBpJbnKKHMa_-j-2q9mHiiKuCV3Pv3KVGd6oxzJ4Ml4sbPYtpCMwzevX2DOVhCV-xI4WzY4td9LgDwr8UFg

Four and a half hours of educational content and discussion, with the opportunity to ask these cyber security leaders your questions (and get 4 Continuing Educational Units of credit!) Come for part or come for all, but be sure not to miss out!

This is also the event in which we are awarding the 2024 CS2AI Passport Awards, in addition to our regular Quality Question Awards!

Event Agenda

1:00 PM Eastern Session 1: Securing the Core: NIS2 Compliance for Multi-National Manufacturing Organizations Featuring Hamish Wishart (Senior Consultant Cyber Security at KPMG) In the increasingly vulnerable cybersecurity landscape, the manufacturing sector stands as a key target for security incidents. Upholding NIS2 compliance is not just a necessity— it's a strategic advantage. This talk offers exclusive insights into driving NIS2 compliance in a multi-national manufacturing environment where organizations must manage facilities in multiple EU Member States. You will learn tailored collaboration strategies with site personnel for comprehensive risk ownership and effective incident detection and response. We will delve into 'quick wins' for immediate security boosts and outline a strategic long-term roadmap. This session aims to equip attendees with the tools needed to bolster OT security and transform what we see as the common pain points into areas of strength.

2:10 PM Eastern Session 2: Asset Owners Panel Discussion Featuring

• Yosef Beck (VP, Cyber Security at CRH)
• Jonas Rendahl (CISO at Aurobay)

Acquire valuable insights from cybersecurity leaders who serve asset owner operations in the manufacturing sector and ask them your questions!

3:10 PM Eastern Session 3: Tales from the Crypt Featuring Aamir Lakhani (Global Security Strategist and Researcher at Fortinet) Attacks on operational technology (OT) — the systems controlling industrial equipment, processes, and events —have leaped from Hollywood screens into reality. What once seemed like special-effects fiction in disaster movies about nuclear meltdowns, power grid collapses, and poisoned water systems is now a genuine threat. OT and manufacturing attacks are not new, but their impact on modern life is more significant than ever.

4:10 PM Eastern Session 4: A Random Walk Through a ~~Million~~ Billion IoT/OT Things A conversation with millions of researched Cyber-Physical Systems… Featuring John Terrill (CISO at Phosphorus Cybersecurity) With billions of IoT and OT devices powering manufacturing and industrial operations today, the xTended Internet of Things (xIoT) now surpasses traditional endpoints by an order of magnitude. Despite their critical roles, many of these IoT and OT Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) remain overlooked and unsecured—operating with default or weak credentials, outdated firmware, insecure configurations, and an end-of-life state. This creates a vast and vulnerable attack surface that threat actors increasingly target to disrupt operations, exfiltrate data, or stage sophisticated ransomware attacks.

In this session, we’ll take a comprehensive journey through the world of IoT and OT/ICS devices, uncovering what we’ve learned over the years about the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the immense benefits of connected devices. From outdated security hygiene to device-specific weaknesses across diverse environments, we’ll explore key insights and real-world examples that highlight the unique challenges of securing these systems.

The session will also delve into the anatomy of OT and OT-adjacent IoT cyberattacks, detailing how attackers exploit these devices to achieve malicious goals. A live hacking demonstration will showcase the methods used to compromise common, yet mission-critical, devices — emphasizing the importance of proactive security measures to disappoint bad actors.

Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the scope and state of this attack surface, the critical role IoT and OT security plays in protecting the modern industrial landscape, and actionable steps that can be taken to strengthen their xIoT security posture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becoming a paid member is quick and easy (and helps us keep offering these educational opportunities!). Please join now! https://www.cs2ai.org/plans-pricing

## All past seminars and symposiums are available to paid CS2AI.ORG members. Check out the Resources area of our website in the Members Portal https://www.cs2ai.org/

## Certificates for Professional Development/Continuing Education Units (PDUs/CEUs) are available for all registered individuals who attend at least one hour of the event.

## If you're interested in speaking at a future (CS)2AI event\, having your organization become a Strategic Alliance Partner\, or engaging in any of the other ways available\, please contact us on our https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved

## Please note that (CS)2AI ONLINE events are provided free of charge as educational career development content through the support of our paid members and the generous contributions of our corporate Strategic Alliance Partners. Contact information used in registering for our directly supported seminars may be shared with sponsors funding those specific events. Unless noted on the Gotowebinar registration page, all events are open for direct funding support.

It's time for the last of our big, half-day events of 2024! Be sure to reserve your seat in our December 4th event with over six speakers, including a panel of senior cyber decision makers from global manufacturing firms! https://events.zoom.us/ev/Ap4VQeoyAjwH8lScyZJG9Ys3Ac4gqTEjC6h4UEb_jIuQ4z_xALZd\~Aq-Nr7MNBpJbnKKHMa_-j-2q9mHiiKuCV3Pv3KVGd6oxzJ4Ml4sbPYtpCMwzevX2DOVhCV-xI4WzY4td9LgDwr8UFg

Four and a half hours of educational content and discussion, with the opportunity to ask these cyber security leaders your questions (and get 4 Continuing Educational Units of credit!) Come for part or come for all, but be sure not to miss out!

This is also the event in which we are awarding the 2024 CS2AI Passport Awards, in addition to our regular Quality Question Awards!

Event Agenda

1:00 PM Eastern Session 1: Securing the Core: NIS2 Compliance for Multi-National Manufacturing Organizations Featuring Hamish Wishart (Senior Consultant Cyber Security at KPMG) In the increasingly vulnerable cybersecurity landscape, the manufacturing sector stands as a key target for security incidents. Upholding NIS2 compliance is not just a necessity— it's a strategic advantage. This talk offers exclusive insights into driving NIS2 compliance in a multi-national manufacturing environment where organizations must manage facilities in multiple EU Member States. You will learn tailored collaboration strategies with site personnel for comprehensive risk ownership and effective incident detection and response. We will delve into 'quick wins' for immediate security boosts and outline a strategic long-term roadmap. This session aims to equip attendees with the tools needed to bolster OT security and transform what we see as the common pain points into areas of strength.

2:10 PM Eastern Session 2: Asset Owners Panel Discussion Featuring

• Yosef Beck (VP, Cyber Security at CRH)
• Jonas Rendahl (CISO at Aurobay)

Acquire valuable insights from cybersecurity leaders who serve asset owner operations in the manufacturing sector and ask them your questions!

3:10 PM Eastern Session 3: Tales from the Crypt Featuring Aamir Lakhani (Global Security Strategist and Researcher at Fortinet) Attacks on operational technology (OT) — the systems controlling industrial equipment, processes, and events —have leaped from Hollywood screens into reality. What once seemed like special-effects fiction in disaster movies about nuclear meltdowns, power grid collapses, and poisoned water systems is now a genuine threat. OT and manufacturing attacks are not new, but their impact on modern life is more significant than ever.

4:10 PM Eastern Session 4: A Random Walk Through a ~~Million~~ Billion IoT/OT Things A conversation with millions of researched Cyber-Physical Systems… Featuring John Terrill (CISO at Phosphorus Cybersecurity) With billions of IoT and OT devices powering manufacturing and industrial operations today, the xTended Internet of Things (xIoT) now surpasses traditional endpoints by an order of magnitude. Despite their critical roles, many of these IoT and OT Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) remain overlooked and unsecured—operating with default or weak credentials, outdated firmware, insecure configurations, and an end-of-life state. This creates a vast and vulnerable attack surface that threat actors increasingly target to disrupt operations, exfiltrate data, or stage sophisticated ransomware attacks.

In this session, we’ll take a comprehensive journey through the world of IoT and OT/ICS devices, uncovering what we’ve learned over the years about the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the immense benefits of connected devices. From outdated security hygiene to device-specific weaknesses across diverse environments, we’ll explore key insights and real-world examples that highlight the unique challenges of securing these systems.

The session will also delve into the anatomy of OT and OT-adjacent IoT cyberattacks, detailing how attackers exploit these devices to achieve malicious goals. A live hacking demonstration will showcase the methods used to compromise common, yet mission-critical, devices — emphasizing the importance of proactive security measures to disappoint bad actors.

Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of the scope and state of this attack surface, the critical role IoT and OT security plays in protecting the modern industrial landscape, and actionable steps that can be taken to strengthen their xIoT security posture.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Becoming a paid member is quick and easy (and helps us keep offering these educational opportunities!). Please join now! https://www.cs2ai.org/plans-pricing

## All past seminars and symposiums are available to paid CS2AI.ORG members. Check out the Resources area of our website in the Members Portal https://www.cs2ai.org/

## Certificates for Professional Development/Continuing Education Units (PDUs/CEUs) are available for all registered individuals who attend at least one hour of the event.

## If you're interested in speaking at a future (CS)2AI event\, having your organization become a Strategic Alliance Partner\, or engaging in any of the other ways available\, please contact us on our https://www.cs2ai.org/get-involved

## Please note that (CS)2AI ONLINE events are provided free of charge as educational career development content through the support of our paid members and the generous contributions of our corporate Strategic Alliance Partners. Contact information used in registering for our directly supported seminars may be shared with sponsors funding those specific events. Unless noted on the Gotowebinar registration page, all events are open for direct funding support.

DevFest Berlin is back! This year back to Humboldt University of Berlin, with more than 25 talks & workshops, you can expect a whole day of learning, socialising, and engaging with a vibrant Berlin Tech community!

🎫 Get you ticket here: pretix.eu/devfestberlin/2024/ 🖍 Call for Papers still open: pretalx.com/devfest-berlin-2024/cfp

Agenda

Day 1

9:00 AM: Registration & Coffee 🥐 ☕️

9:45 AM: 🎤 Welcoming

10:00 AM: 🎤 Katya Vinnichenko - Introduction to Google Principles of Responsible AI

This year's DevFest explores how AI can improve lives globally, from business to healthcare to education. At Google we acknowledge AI's potential, while also recognising the challenges it presents. Thus, we are committed to helping you build and use AI responsibly, ensuring fairness and ethical practices.

In my talk you will learn: the main principles of responsible AI at Google; the ethical implications of AI; best practices for developing AI systems and integrating AI into Google products and services; last but not least – how AI will change the role of the developer as we know it.

10:50 AM: 🎤 Oleksii Antypov - DMARC Demystified

Discover the essential framework behind DMARC and how it secures email communication across the internet. This session covers the historical evolution of email security, dives into the common challenges of implementing DMARC, and provides actionable best practices for protecting your domain. Ideal for developers, security professionals, and anyone interested in safe email practices.

In a world where phishing and email spoofing are constant threats, DMARC stands as a vital defense mechanism. “DMARC Demystified” takes you through a journey from the origins of email security to the modern challenges and solutions that DMARC offers. We'll explore how DMARC works with SPF and DKIM, why it’s essential for organizations of all sizes, and the practical steps to ensure smooth implementation.

Expect an interactive timeline tracing the milestones of email security, detailed breakdowns of real-world cases, and insights into optimizing DMARC. Walk away with a deeper understanding of email protection, armed with knowledge to strengthen your email systems and protect against threats.

11:40 AM: 🎤 Marcin Chudy - Demystifying App Architecture: The LeanCode Guide

At LeanCode we developed over 40 Flutter apps, spanning from huge enterprise apps to nimble startup ventures. Some were developed by a single Flutter dev, some came into light through collaborative efforts across multiple teams. Each of them was different. Each of them presented unique challenges and taught us invaluable lessons.

In this talk, we invite you to explore different approaches to architecting Flutter apps. Central to our narrative will be the concept of architectural drivers - key factors or priorities that steer our decisions about how the app is structured and designed. We'll show how we leverage our experience when approaching new projects. Drawing from our successes and failures, we'll present our current Flutter stack which enables us to craft robust, scalable, and maintainable applications. While there is no silver bullet for Flutter architecture, we can still have some sensible defaults.

Why do we use BLoC for state management? Why not Riverpod? Why do we love hook

12:30 PM: 🎤 Danny Preussler - Ten things you heard about testing that might be wrong

Testing became an essential part of Android development. Many conference talks have been given and even more best practices have been written.

But what if, as time evolved, some of the things we thought were true, changed?

Let’s start questioning some of these in this talk: Are flaky tests fixable? Are mocks even harmful? Is DI about testing? Did we understand testing in isolation properly? Is the test pyramid still valid? And in times of AI, should we generate tests?

Come and join my session to learn more!

1:10 PM: Lunch 🍔🥤

2:40 PM: 🎤 Andrey Sitnik - Privacy-first architecture: alternatives to GDPR popup and local-first

Why and how modern developers could increase the privacy of modern Web.

The popularity of clouds, the rise of huge monopolies across the internet, and the growth of shady data brokers recently have made the world a much more dangerous place for ordinary people—here is how we fix it.

In this talk, Andrey Sitnik, the creator of PostCSS and the privacy-first open-source RSS reader, will explain how we can stop this dangerous trend and make the web a private place again. — Beginners will find simple steps, which can be applied to any website — Advanced developers will get practical insights into new local-first architecture — Privacy experts could find useful unique privacy tricks from a global world perspective and beyond just U.S. privacy risks

3:30 PM: 🎤 Raphaël VO - Largest Contentful Paint - The unheard story

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is more than a speed metric — it's the unseen factor shaping user experiences and impacting SEO. While often overlooked, LCP reveals when a page’s core content is truly ready, affecting how users perceive load time and usability. This talk uncovers LCP’s role, why it matters more than we think, and simple strategies to boost LCP for better engagement and rankings. Discover the hidden story behind one of web performance’s most crucial, yet understated metrics.

Did you know the speed of a single webpage element could decide if users stay or leave? Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is that hidden hero, quietly working to load the most important content quickly. This talk unveils LCP’s role in creating faster, more engaging web experiences and why it’s key to winning user loyalty. Dive into the “unheard story” of LCP and discover practical tips to make your site not only faster but unforgettable.

4:20 PM: 🎤 Ash Davies - Navigation in a Multiplatform World: Choosing the Right Framework for your App

Navigation in mobile, desktop, and web applications is such a fundamental part of how we structure our architecture. In order to both obtain functional clarity, and abstraction from platform level implementation.

For a long time, there have been options available specific to each platform, and even options part of the platform framework itself. Though it can be difficult to find the right option for platform-agnostic code, ensuring consistency. Some go one step further, providing an opinionated guide on how to architecture your application.

In this talk, I'll evaluate the options available, how they differ, and to what type of applications they are best suited. Including how to get started with them, and the best practice guidelines on how to get the most out of them, for your application.

5:10 PM: 🎤 Vadim Makeev - You don’t know MathML. Almost nobody does

Do you speak math? Me neither. Still, math formulas have always been around: from Wikipedia articles to JavaScript APIs and even CSS docs. It looks so alien that I never had a clue how to express it on the web. Apparently, there’s a markup language for that. HTML for content, SVG for vector graphics, and MathML for math! And it’s pretty cross-browser, too. Let’s dive into the basics and quirks of the language of the universe. Even if math is not your love language, you might learn something interesting about the web platform.

Day 2

9:00 AM: Registration & Coffee 🥐 ☕️

10:00 AM: 🎤 Alex Mir – Accessibility matters

The regulators are here and now businesses will care about the a11y. Let's make the a11y compliance not just a formal check. I believe that it is our job as industry experts to understand why it is important and get our products ready for all groups of people.

10:50 AM: 🎤 Marco Gomiero - From Android to Multiplatform and beyond

With Kotlin Multiplatform getting increasingly established, many Android libraries became multiplatform.

But how to make an existing Android library multiplatform?

In this talk, we will cover the common challenges faced while migrating Android libraries to Kotlin Multiplatform, like handling platform-specific dependencies, re-organizing the project structure without losing the contributor's history, testing on multiple platforms, and publishing the library.

11:20 AM: 🎤 Muhammad Salman Bediya - Crucial Performance Issue in Flutter Apps: Memory Leaks

Memory leaks can be hard to spot but have a big impact on the performance of Flutter apps, especially those running for long periods. In this talk, we’ll explore the most common reasons memory leaks happen in Flutter and Dart, focusing on how asynchronous programming and Streams can make them more challenging. You’ll learn practical tips to identify and fix these issues, helping your apps run smoother and more efficiently.

11:40 AM: 🎤 Andrii Raikov - Maximizing Scalability with Go and Redis: A Telemetry Processing Journey

At Delivery Hero, we process 10,000 requests per second using Go and Redis. Join us to learn how this powerful duo handles high-load telemetry data efficiently and cost-effectively, with scalability, resource optimization, and continuous innovation through customized data flows.

12:30 PM: 🎤 Tomek Porozynski - Can You Outsmart an AI? Adventures in Prompt Hacking

In this talk combined with hands-on elements, participants will engage in a series of live prompt hacking challenges, accessible directly through their mobile devices. The workshop begins with simple prompt injection techniques and progressively moves to more sophisticated manipulation strategies. After each successful hack, I'll analyze what made it work and transform these insights into practical defense mechanisms.

Attendees will learn: Common vulnerabilities in AI prompt design, Practical techniques for prompt injection attacks, Essential strategies for securing chatbot applications, Best practices for implementing defensive layers, Real-world examples of prompt security failures and successes

Perfect for developers working with AI models, security enthusiasts, or anyone interested in building safer AI applications. No specialized tools needed - just bring your phone and creativity! You'll leave with concrete techniques for both testing and securing your AI systems against prompt manipulation attacks.

1:10 PM: Lunch 🍔🥤

2:40 PM: 🎤 Cesar Martinez - Domain Driven Design Fundamentals for Frontend Developers

What can we learn from Domain Driven Design and how to start applying its teachings in your frontend codebase.

3:30 PM: 🎤 Vadym Pinchuk - Effortless optimization of Flutter apps: performance tips for developers

In this session, we’ll dive into effortless yet impactful ways to optimize your Flutter applications. Performance improvements don’t always require a full rewrite—sometimes, small adjustments can lead to big gains. We'll explore practical tips and tricks for enhancing app speed, responsiveness, and efficiency with minimal effort. From reducing widget rebuilds to handling large data efficiently and managing state effectively, this talk will provide developers with actionable insights to deliver a smoother user experience. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Flutter dev, you’ll walk away with easy-to-apply techniques to optimize your apps without breaking a sweat.

4:20 PM: 🎤 Ian Ballantyne - Generative AI on Mobile and Web with Google AI Edge

Generative AI is no longer limited to execution in the cloud. Small language models, such as Gemma 2B, are quickly becoming small and powerful enough for on-device AI, offering benefits like low latency, offline functionality, privacy, and cost-effectiveness. Google AI Edge, with MediaPipe and LiteRT (formerly Tensorflow Lite), enables the development and deployment of efficient on-device AI models. These frameworks handle the complexities of model execution and hardware acceleration, allowing developers to focus on creating innovative AI experiences.

Think generative AI is just about chatbots? Think again. This talk will go beyond basic conversations with language models and explore how on-device generative AI can be integrated into everyday apps ready to help with tasks, answer questions, and provide creative inspiration, all powered by the information located on-device. Imagine truly useful apps that are quick to respond and still work without an internet connection.

5:10 PM: 🎤 Bogdan Plieshka - Automated Testing Layers in a multidimensional Monorepo: Fast-tracking Quality for hundreds apps

In this talk, I’ll dive into the testing layers that make up our quality pipeline at Zattoo, including static analysis, unit, system, and end-to-end testing.

We’ll discuss the concept of quality gates, shift-left approach, and affected domain recognition, which helps us maintain reliability across a large, dynamic codebase, bringing total quality feedback for contributors to 3 minutes.

I’ll share practices for achieving scalable, fast testing in a high-complexity environment, offering insights for anyone working with large-scale applications or monorepos and looking to streamline QA processes.

Day 3

9:00 AM: Registration & Coffee 🥐 ☕️

10:00 AM: 🎤 Inès Mir & Doruk Deniz Kutukculer - Fellowship of Product. How your team setup affects your experience

Did you know there are 2 types of team formation in tech? These formations can change your experience in the team drastically and you better recognise them early to adjust your expectations from the job. And even more importantly, you need to show different qualities on job interviews to get this job in a particular team formation!

Deniz Doruk Kuetuekcueler, a head of engineering, and Inès Mir, a principal product designer, are trying to figure out how design and engineering can effectively work together in these setups.

10:50 AM: 🎤 Alireza Rahmaty - How we automate the App Release Monitoring at GetYourGuide

App release monitoring (ARM) represents a suite of innovative tools designed to monitor the health and stability of iOS and Android app releases. These tools provide real-time updates by sending notifications to Slack channels and logging the app's status throughout the release process. At GetYourGuide, we have developed an ARM to monitor the rollout of our Android and iOS apps from the moment they are submitted to the App Store & Google Play until they are fully released. We ship releases faster and with more confidence using ARM!

11:40 AM: 🎤 Aleksandr Gorbunov - Flutter for frontenders or There and Back Again

Every developer, regardless of specialization, may encounter the need to create a UI for a client application. The choice of technology may depend on the developer, or it may be pre-determined by the client, as happened in my case.

The peculiarity is that, coming from frontend development in JavaScript, I started building user interfaces in Flutter.

Today, there is a vast number of technologies that enable the development of cross-platform applications. These technologies are evolving rapidly, attracting large communities, and more frequently, companies are adopting them. For example, Flutter is a powerful framework that allows developers to create cross-platform applications.

With a high probability, every developer may encounter the need to use such development tools, and it’s great that frameworks like Flutter come with detailed documentation and extensive community support, making it relatively easy to start developing with them. Although, at first glance, everything might not seem smooth, and the desire to revert to familiar methods may arise.

12:05 PM: 🎤 Muhammad Salman Bediya - Crucial Performance Issue in Flutter Apps: Memory Leaks

Memory leaks can be hard to spot but have a big impact on the performance of Flutter apps, especially those running for long periods. In this talk, we’ll explore the most common reasons memory leaks happen in Flutter and Dart, focusing on how asynchronous programming and Streams can make them more challenging. You’ll learn practical tips to identify and fix these issues, helping your apps run smoother and more efficiently.

12:30 PM: 🎤 Ole Bulbuk - Native GUIs For All

Traditionally native GUIs are highly platform dependent and often specific for one programming language. In this talk we will explore a way to create GUI applications that supports virtually all platforms and any programming language. It is very effective and easy to use, too.

1:10 PM: Lunch 🍔🥤

2:40 PM: 🎤 Nicole Terc - Tap it! Shake it! Fling it! Sheep it! - The Gesture Animations Dance!

Let's have fun with animations, gestures and sensors!

Using Compose Multiplatform, we'll go over how to create animations using gestures and sensor events for Android & iOS. We'll cover some basics like how to get the device motion and position information, how to track gestures in the screen, and how you can combine them with animations to have fun!

After this talk, you'll have a better understanding on how to use the sensor frameworks, how to make your own gesture effects, and how to create interesting animations in an easy way.

Keep it fun, keep it animated!

3:30 PM: 🎤 Andrii Khrystian - From waves to widgets: Sound processing in Flutter

In this talk, we'll explore how to work with sound in Flutter apps. We'll go over the basics of adding sound effects and processing audio to make your apps more interesting. You'll learn how to handle audio files and integrate them smoothly with your Flutter projects. This session is great for anyone looking to add audio features to their apps simply and effectively.

4:20 PM: 🎤 Randy Nel Gupta - From Practice: Migration of an Order Processing System to the Cloud

A case study on how an order processing system, processing 50,000 orders daily for an international retailer spread across multiple continents and jurisdictions, is migrated to the cloud. The legacy system is implemented in PL/SQL and must be migrated during ongoing operations.

The presentation will cover all aspects from testing, monitoring, to development and the application of Site Reliability Engineering.

Furthermore, less technical topics will be introduced, such as the systematic composition of teams to ensure the necessary technical as well as domain-specific expertise.

4:50 PM: 🎤 Wietse Venema - Running open large language models in production with serverless GPUs

Many developers are interested in running open large language models, such as Google's Gemma and Llama. Open models give you full control over the deployment options, the timing of model upgrades, the private data that goes into the model, and the ability to fine-tune on specific tasks such as data extraction. Hugging Face TGI is a popular open-source LLM inference server, and Hugging Face TRL is excellent for fine-tuning. You’ll learn how to build and deploy an application that uses an open model on Google Cloud Run with cost-effective GPUs that scale down to zero instances.

Day 4

9:00 AM: Registration & Coffee 🥐 ☕️

10:00 AM: 🎤 Daniel Stamer & Diana Nanova - Workshop: From Prototype to Production

In this hands-on technical workshop participants will work on a hilarious web service prototype and deploy it to the cloud, set up build and deployment pipelines, extend the code base to leverage GenAI functionality, use SRE practices to effectively operate the application and finally strengthen the security posture of the overall software delivery process to guard against supply chain attacks.

1:10 PM: Lunch 🍔🥤

2:40 PM: 🎤 John Nguyen - Building a Chrome Extension using Gemini and Langchain

In this workshop, you will learn the basics of creating a Google Chrome Extension (which will also work on any Chromium-based Browser). We will build a simple Page summarizer using Bun, Typescript, Gemini, and LangChain. We will learn the anatomy of the manifest.json for building a Chrome Extension, Bun's bundler, how to interact with Gemini, and why LangChain is a good idea here.

3:45 PM: 🎤 Guillaume Vernade - How to make the most of Gemini multimodal capabilities?

We all know that in Tech there are always dozens of way of doing anything. But what if we could only use LLM for a first investigation? Let me show you how I'm trying to solve the mystery of who killed my pond's fishes using the power of Gemini.

Day 5

9:00 AM: Registration & Coffee 🥐 ☕️

10:00 AM: 🎤 Mario Bodemann & Joost van Dijk - Workshop: Passkeys on Android: How to get rid of passwords

Passwords. Or two factors? What about multiple factors? Which email did you register with? Why is 'password123' not working on this side, that is password is shared everywhere else?

If you recognize some of those questions, I am happy to add another couple: What are passkeys? Or how about: How to use passkeys to replace passwords in an Android app?

In this workshop I will walk through the later two questions: How to build an Android App that registers and signs users in, using passkeys. Expect a quick explanation of this fancy new technology, why it will replace passwords and how you can store them either on your mobile devices or on dedicated hardware. Following that, a fictive application and service will be built to show you how to use those passkeys and which moving pieces you will need.

Expect to use you Android Studio with Kotlin and common best practices to build an Android app, talking to the public available backend.

11:05 AM: 🎤 Anton Borries - Workshop: Adding Homescreen Widgets to Flutter Apps

HomeScreen Widgets are a great way to provide more Information to your Users right on their HomeScreens providing more ways for your App to appear in User's lives and help them achieve their goals.

In this Workshop we'll look at the necessary steps needed in order to add HomeScreen Widgets to Flutter Apps using the home_widget package

12:10 PM: 🎤 Elena Grahovac - Workshop: Mastering Multiple Engineering Leadership Roles for Maximum Impact

As an engineering manager or technical leader, navigating multiple roles that demand a diverse set of skills is a common yet challenging part of the job.

In this workshop, we will explore how to effectively balance these multiple roles and responsibilities in a complex engineering environment. Participants will be guided through the creation of their own leadership framework, tailored to adapt to the unique situations and styles of each individual. Beginning with identifying core values and responsibilities, the framework is elaborated into an actionable plan to succeed.

This workshop not only offers an opportunity for reflection on personal and professional development but also provides tools and insights to enhance management capabilities and team dynamics. Join us to cultivate a comprehensive approach to leadership that aligns with your unique role, responsibilities, and personal style.

1:10 PM: Lunch 🍔🥤

2:40 PM: 🎤 Gus Martins - Workshop: Gemma for Everyone: Your First Steps with Open Models and AI

Dive into the world of open models and AI with Gemma! This workshop will guide you through the basics of using Gemma, Google's powerful family of language models. Learn how to harness Gemma's capabilities for tasks like text generation, question answering, and more. We'll also explore how to fine-tune Gemma on your own data, allowing you to create custom AI solutions tailored to your needs. No prior experience with large language models is required!

3:45 PM: 🎤 Shahriyar Rzayev - Learn Flask the hard way: Introduce Architecture Patterns

Flask is a popular and flexible web framework for Python, but building scalable and maintainable Flask applications can be challenging without a solid understanding of architecture patterns. This workshop aims to provide participants with a detailed explanation of applying architecture patterns to Flask projects. By exploring various design principles and best practices, attendees will learn how to structure their Flask applications for improved scalability, modularity, and maintainability.

Focusing on the Repository, Unit of Work, and Use Cases patterns, attendees will gain experience in applying these patterns to enhance code organization, maintainability, and testability. All these layers are wired together using Dependency Injection, which is yet another powerful tool to use in your applications.

The application we are going to build is stored in: https://github.com/ShahriyarR/hexagonal-flask-blog-tutorial

We are going to completely rewrite the official Blog application described in Flask documentation by applying architecture patterns.

All abstraction layers are covered by unit and integration tests, which will give the attendees a detailed view of why it is important to structure the application using architecture patterns.

Speakers

Aleksandr Gorbunov - Smart Steel Technologies (Full Stack Developer)

A skilled developer specializing in JavaScript (JS) and TypeScript (TS), with strong expertise in frontend development. Proficient in the Vue ecosystem (Vue2, Vue3, Composition API, Nuxt 3), using Webpack and Vite for project bundling. Experienced in testing with Vitest, Cypress, and Jest. Adept in CSS preprocessors like SASS and Stylus. Additionally, has solid knowledge of Flutter and experie…

Andrey Sitnik - Evil Martians (Lead Engineer)

With more than 20 years in open source, Andrey Sitnik created a few popular CSS tools (PostCSS, Autoprefixer), local-first framework (Logux), and many small libraries with millions of downloads (like Nano ID).

Andrii Khrystian - Dynatrace (Senior Flutter Developer)

GDG Linz organiser. Senior Flutter Developer at Dynatrace. Public speaker and tech writer

Andrii Raikov - Delivery Hero SE (Principal Software Engineer)

Andrii is a Principal Software Engineer at Delivery Hero. He has a total of 15 years of experience with Ruby and has been very passionate about Go for the last 5 years.

Anton Borries - 1KOMMA5° (Software Engineer)

Anton is a Software Engineer working at 1KOMMA5° He loves building great UI and UX using Flutter. Coming from an Android Background the gap between Flutter and native Features has always tickled his interest. This has lead him into improving the experience of developing HomeScreen Widgets for Flutter Apps

Ash Davies

Google Developer Expert for Android, enthusiastic speaker, lead engineer at ImmobilieenScout24, Kotlin aficionado, spends more time travelling than working.

Daniel Stamer - Google (Cloud Customer Engineer)

Daniel is passionate about building modern cloud-native applications on Google's serverless technologies. He works with digital natives out of Germany’s startup capital Berlin and helps to modernize applications or build brand new ones in the cloud.

Danny Preussler - SoundCloud (Android Platform Lead)

Danny is a developer by heart, living in Berlin and leading the Android team at SoundCloud. He worked for companies like Groupon, Viacom, eBay and Alcatel and started his mobile career long before any Android with Java ME and Blackberry applications. Danny writes and talks about mobile development and testing regularly and is a Google Developer Expert for Android and Kotlin.

Elena Grahovac - FerretDB (Director of Engineering)

Elena has been in software engineering since 2007, focusing on backend systems and infrastructure. Having played the roles of both individual contributor and engineering manager, Elena is passionate about combining technical expertise with strong team collaboration. A dedicated advocate of DevOps practices, she aims to enhance workflows and bring teams together. Elena believes in helping peopl…

Gus Martins - Google (Developer Advocate)

Katya Vinnichenko - Google (Program Manager)

Katya is a Program Manager at Google Developer Relations team. Currently she is leading the Google Developer Groups across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Marcin Chudy - LeanCode (Senior Flutter Developer)

Marcin is a Senior Flutter Developer at LeanCode, currently playing tech lead role in a big project for the banking sector. Previously worked with backend, web frontend with React, finally settling on mobile and falling in love with Flutter at first sight. After work, he enjoys dancing salsa and bachata and attends metal concerts. Marcin is a Senior Flutter Developer at LeanCode and has …

Marco Gomiero - Airalo (Senior Android Developer | Kotlin GDE)

Marco is an Android engineer, currently working at Airalo. He is a Google Developer Expert for Kotlin, he loves Kotlin and he has experience with native Android and native iOS development, as well as cross-platform development with Flutter and Kotlin Multiplatform. In his spare time, he writes and maintains open-source code, he shares his dev experience by writing on his blog, speaking a…

Mario Bodeman - Yubico (Android Developer Advocate)

Speaker of talks, coder of code, doer of dones.

Muhammad Bediya

Muhammad Salman is a Senior Software Engineer specializing in mobile app development with a focus on building scalable, high-quality applications using Flutter, React Native, Xamarin, and Swift. With experience leading frontend teams on enterprise-level projects that have reached over 1.5 million users, he brings a strong commitment to creating impactful, user-centered solutions. A dedic…

Nicole Terc

Android GDE, Boardgame lover, videogame addict and origami enthusiast, Nicole self taught herself to code and has been fooling around with the Android ecosystem for more than 10 years. She has participated in a diverse variety of projects for several clients around the world, including video streaming, news, social media and public transport applications. Regardless of what the current adventu…

Ole Bulbuk - Ardan Labs

Ole is a backend engineer since the nineties. He has been working for many companies big and small and seen many projects fail or succeed. He loves to be part of the global Go community and working on projects that make the world a better place. In his spare time he is co-organising the Berlin chapter of GDG Golang, develops open source software and enjoys time with his family.

Oleksii Antypov - DmarcDkim.com (Founder & CEO)

Experienced CTO specializing in early-stage startups. Formerly with Rocket Internet and PocketBook, now focused on accelerating global DMARC adoption. Originally from Ukraine, I relocated to Berlin in 2015 to deepen my expertise in building successful startups from the ground up.

Raphaël VO - Ekino (Senior Software Engineer)

I’m Raphael Vo, a passionate Senior Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience, specializing in Angular and frontend development. I love turning complex ideas into delightful user experiences and tackling challenges creatively and enthusiastically. When I'm not coding, you’ll find me diving into the latest tech trends or enjoying epic board game nights with friends. As an aspiring spea…

Vadim Makeev

Frontend developer in love with the Web, browsers, bicycles, and podcasting. He/him, MDN technical writer, Google Developer Expert.

Alex Mir - mobile.de (Frontend Engineer)

Frontend Engineer at car retail platform mobile.de (part of Adevinta / ex-Ebay)

Alireza Rahmaty - GetYourGuide (Android Developer)

I am Alireza, an Android developer with 6+ years of experience building apps. I have experience building server-driven UI apps, complex UI, localisation and testing, and CI/CDI. I sometimes go hiking and play video games.

Cesar Martinez - Meyer Sound (Web Developer)

Web developer with around 10 years of experience and a passion for software architecture. Currently working at Meyer Sound.

Bogdan Plieshka - Zattoo (Principal Engineer)

Engineer with over a decade of Frontend development experience, passionate about automation, accessibility, and scaling complex systems. Working at Zattoo as a Principal Engineer, focusing on delivering frontend solutions across Web, React, and React Native for streaming media content.Organizer of the React Berlin Meetup, actively contributing to the development community.

Diana Nanova - Google (Customer Engineering Manager)

Diana is a Customer Engineering Manager at Google Cloud. Based in the German tech startup capital Berlin, Diana helps digital native customers and startups across various industries to leverage the capabilities of Google Cloud and loves championing for Google culture.

Doruk Deniz Kutukculer - Zalando (Head of Engineering)

IT professional and a leader with over 15 years of experience in the industry. Currently a Head of Engineering at Zalando.

Guillaume Vernade - Google (AI Dev Rel)

I've been a jack-of-all-trades in the Tech industry, starting as a prototyper building apps on Google Glasses and the first Android watches, then became a Product Owner and an Agile coach. I realized my childhood dream of becoming a video game producer then came back to my other passion: AI.

Ian Ballantyne - Google (AI DevRel)

Ian is a Developer Relations Engineer for AI at Google. Currently he works on generative AI, such as Gemini and Gemma. He is passionate about on-device AI, using technologies such as Google AI Edge to deploy artificial intelligence to web and mobile devices. He has been in Developer Relations at Google for 9 years specializing in helping partners and developers unlock the capability of Google …

Inès Mir - Zalando (Principal Product Designer)

A principal product designer at Zalando and a content creator.

John Nguyen - Eon (Backend Developer)

Fullstack developer with a knack for whipping up code recipes using my secret ingredients: a dash of JavaScript, a pinch of Python, and a whole lot of serverless magic John's journey in software development began as a PHP developer, but he later transitioned to front-end development and became passionate about all things related to Javascript. While working as a data DevOps engineer in a…

Joost van Dijk - Yubico (Developer Advocate)

Joost van Dijk is a developer advocate at Yubico. As the inventor of the YubiKey, Yubico makes secure login easy and available for everyone. Joost focuses on securing digital identities and accelerating the adoption of open authentication standards as part of Yubico’s developer program.

Randy Gupta

Randy is a Google Developer Expert for Cloud and also Organizer of the GDG Düsseldorf. With a professional experience of more 25 years in software development he is focused today on building microservices applications on top of Kubernetes.

Shahriyar Rzayev - Nord Security (Senior Software Engineer)

Senior Software Engineer @ Nord Security. Moving forward on Clean Code and Clean Architecture. Previous accomplishments include contributing to open source, providing technical direction, and sharing knowledge about Clean Code and Architectural patterns. An empathetic team player and mentor. Azerbaijan Python Group Leader. Former QA Engineer and Bug Hunter.

Tomek Porożyński - Atos

Vadym Pinchuk - Sky (Mobile Software Engineer)

Vadym, a seasoned software engineer, possesses a wealth of experience in Android application development. He has skillfully transitioned his expertise to cross-platform development, utilizing Flutter. Throughout his career, Vadym has collaborated with a diverse range of companies, from industry giants like Samsung, Volvo, Bosch, and Instagram to smaller start-ups. Leveraging his extensiv…

Wietse Venema - Google (Google Cloud Engineer)

Wietse Venema is an engineer at Google Cloud. He wrote the O’Reilly book on Cloud Run.

Hosts

Seemran Xec - Sawayo (Software Engineer)

A focused developer possessing professional experience of 6+ years in software development for product-based and service-based industries, with businesses acquiring valuable insight and implementing best practices. Collaborated with startups and other businesses as a freelancer/consultant to build, design, and manage the product. I'm passionate about what I do and a lifelong learner.

Louis Tsai - Zalando SE (GDG Organizer)

Alex Mir - mobile.de (Frontend Engineer)

Frontend Engineer at car retail platform mobile.de (part of Adevinta / ex-Ebay)

Jhoon Saravia - Greenmates (Mobile Engineer)

Software consultant and developer, experienced in Android, Flutter and Full-stack. Interested in working on DEI initiatives as a complement to my core work. Particularly interested in technology, gadgetry, the future, the combination of those three and the impact that driving Diversity, Equity and Inclusion has on all of them both in and out of the workplace.Amateur photographer a…

Matthias Geisler - Thermondo (Senior Software Engineer)

True believer in (Kotlin) Multiplatform and working with it for over 4 years now. Builds solutions for Android. Maintainer and developer of KMock. Co-Organizer of KUG Berlin, GDG Android Berlin, Rust Berlin and XTC Berlin.

Emy Jamalian - Atlas Metrics (Software QA Engineer)

Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-berlin-presents-devfest-berlin-2024/.

This event provides individual career advice and offers and opportunity to ask any questions in 1 on 1 sessions with professionals. If you are a beginner or someone who wants to grow in their role, you might find the right mentor to get some bite-sized advice to help you towards your goals.

✍️ Event description This Speed Mentoring event is inspired by Speed Dating: Career advice and mentorship, but without any commitment. The mentors offer multiple limited time windows for 1 on 1 conversations with mentees. The mentees get to ask any questions regarding their professional growth.

The event shall provide a safe space for people getting into the industry or trying to improve their careers where they can ask any questions and get support.

This event does not promise a long-term mentoring relationship. Any relationship beyond this evening is up to the individuals.

And while you wait for your mentoring slot, join a group discussion on tech, career or personal growth topics!

🏢 Location We are kindly hosted by Deloitte and there will be snacks and drinks available.

⏰ Agenda 18:30 Doors open + sign up for one or more mentoring slots 19:00 Intro and welcome 19:10 Mentoring & discussion rounds start 20:40 Sessions end

🗣 Mentors

Camila Coello Merino - Frontend developer & accessibility expert Olivia Maly - Team Lead & Data scientist Dr. Florian Schmidt - IT Architect Vardan Torosyan - Senior Engineering Manager Anna Honchar - Senior Software Tester Durdona Juraeva - Frontend developer & AI enthusiast Meike Pollakowski - Senior Software Engineer Zahra Beigi - Senior Product Designer Leonor Oliveira - Backend / Platform engineer Alcione Ribeiro - Junior frontend engineer & Youtuber John Ford - Lead Platform engineer Rachel Sleet - Senior Software Engineer Anzhelika Kurbatova - Manager Nurgun Rafizade: Solution Engineer/Consultant

🏢 About Deloitte Deloitte, renowned for its innovation and commitment to diversity, invites professionals and graduates to an exclusive networking event hosted by its Cloud Transformation and Systems Engineering department. Whether it's strategy formulation or hands-on implementation, Deloitte offers a platform to explore the forefront of business and technology innovation while fostering valuable connections and mentorship opportunities. The event also introduces Deloitte's DiveIn Trainee Program, offering graduates a 5-month opportunity to dive into Cloud & Data and Consulting topics, alongside earning certifications from leading cloud hyperscalers.

👋 About Us Stay in touch with the community! Join our Slack: https://bit.ly/WomenCodersBerlinSlack We are a local community dedicated to empowering diverse women to excel in technology career. Our events offer study groups, technical workshops, hackathons, networking events, panel discussions, lightning talks, and social events. We help you build the skills you need to raise your professional profile and achieve greater career success.

💗 Code of Conduct We are dedicated to providing a safe and welcoming experience for everyone who participates in our events. Our events aim to empower diverse women and we welcome everyone who identifies as a woman or another underrepresented group in tech or an ally. We follow the Berlin Code of Conduct for our events: https://berlincodeofconduct.org/

📸 Media Consent We may be taking photos of this event for social media posts. If you do not want to be photographed, please let the organizers at the event know. We will make sure to respect your privacy.

Calling all Generative AI developers and early stage startups! We are thrilled to bring the GenAI community together for a day-long hackathon at MongoDB’s HQ on the 38th floor!

Try new GenAI tools, models, frameworks and platforms and bring your innovative ideas to life. Lite breakfast, lunch, dinner and prizes will be provided, as well as speakers/workshops, free credits, access to the sponsor APIs, and more!

RSVP'ing to this invite is great, but to confirm your spot please submit your registration here.

Schedule: 9:30 am Networking, Coffee and Bagels 10:00 am Welcome & Introductions 10:30 am Lightning Talks

• MongoDB Chatbot Framework by ​Ben Perlmutter, Sr. Engineer, MongoDB
• TBD, Andriy Mulyar, Founder and CTO, Nomic
• ​Building a Multimodal Finance App by Ethan Steininger, Founder and CEO Mixpeek
• TBD, Igor Alekseev, Partner Solutions Architect, AWS

11:15 am Form teams and begin hacking 12:30 pm Lunch 6:30 pm Dinner 8:00 pm Demos & Judging 9:30 pm Awards 10:00 pm End ​Spots are limited. You must be registered and approved to attend. Apply now!

​​Sponsor Prizes

• ​Best Use of MongoDB Vector Search - Desktop GPU
• ​Best Use of Hugging Face - $1000 of HF Credits
• ​Best Use of Nomic - $500 Cash Prize
• Best Use of Mixpeek - Apple Watch Series 9

​Each team can have up to 4 members. There is a Discord group for accepted hackers to be able to meet and form teams.

Meet the Judges Our panel of esteemed judges will include:

• ​Joshua Rahn, Co-founder & General Partner, Oceans Ventures
• John Willis, Author & Consultant, MongoDB
• Anaiya Raisinghani, Associate Developer Advocate, MongoDB
• Andriy Mulyar, Founder and CTO, Nomic
• Ethan Steininger, Founder and CEO, Mixpeek
• Dawood Khan, Hugging Face

​Sponsors MongoDB is the primary sponsor. A special thank you to our participating partners and friends for their help in this one-of-a-kind event.