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For our first meetup of 2026, we're bringing you two deeply technical stories from the front lines of applied AI, together with AI Native Netherlands. We'll hear how the ANWB navigates the challenges of imperfect data in a legacy organization, and then dive into a practical guide for building production-grade AI agentic workflows with Elastic.

We’ll cover:

• ANWB's journey from manual operations to real-world AI predictions.
• Balancing the human and technical challenges of AI innovation.
• A practical guide to building production-grade agentic workflows.
• Integrating LLMs, vector search, and security into a simplified stack.

Speakers 1: Yke Rusticus & David Brummer (ANWB) Yke is a data engineer at ANWB with a background in astronomy and artificial intelligence. In the industry, he learned that AI models and algorithms often do not get past the experimentation phase, leading him to specialise in MLOps to bridge the gap between experimentation and production. As a professional in this field, Yke has developed ML platforms and use cases across different cloud providers, and is passionate about sharing his knowledge through tutorials and trainings.

David is a self-acclaimed “not your typical Data Scientist” who loves analogue photography, vegan food, dogs, and holds an unofficial PhD in thrifting and sourcing second-hand pearls. With a background in growth hacking and experience in the digital marketing trenches of a startup, a scale-up, and a digital agency, he now brings together lean startup thinking, marketing know-how, and sales pitches, blending it all with a passion for creativity and tech at the ANWB. As a bridge between business and data, David focuses on building AI solutions that don’t just work, but actually get used.

Talk: How AI is helping you back on the road We learn at school what AI can do when the data is perfect. We learn at conferences what AI can do when the environment is perfect. In this talk, you'll learn what AI can do when neither is perfect. This story is about the process of overcoming these challenges in an organisation that has been around since the invention of the bike. We'll balance the technical aspect of these solutions with the human aspect throughout the talk. Because in the end, it's not actually AI helping you back on the road, it's people.

Speaker 2: Hans Heerooms (Elastic) Hans Heerooms is a Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic. He has worked in various roles, but always with one objective: helping organisations to get the most out of their data with the least amount of effort. His current role at Elastic is all about supporting Elastic’s customers to help them evolve from data driven decisions to AI guided workflows.

Talk: Building Production-Grade AI Agentic Workflows with Elastic This talk tells and shows how Elastic Agent Builder can help to build and implement agentic workflows. It addresses the complexity of traditional development by integrating all necessary components—LLM orchestration, vector database, tracing, and security—directly into the Elasticsearch Search AI Platform. This talk will show you how to build custom agents, declare and assign tools, and start conversations with your data.

Agenda: 17:45 — Arrival, food & drinks 18:30 — Talk #1 \| Yke & David (ANWB) 19:15 — Short break 19:30 — Talk #2 \| Hans Heerooms (Elastic) 20:15 — Open conversation, networking & more drinks 21:00 — Wrapping up

Please note that the main door will close at 18.00. You will still be able to enter our office, but we might ask you to wait a little bit while we come down to open the door for you.

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. If you're working on MLOps, applied AI, or building agentic workflows, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Who this is for: Data scientists, AI/ML engineers, data engineers, MLOps specialists, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and using real-world AI solutions.

Where to find us: Elastic's office in Amsterdam Keizersgracht 281, 1016 ED Amsterdam

Hi everyone, Many of you asked for more practical, real-world AI use-cases, and we listened!

For our first meetup of 2026, we're bringing you two deeply technical stories from the front lines of applied AI. We'll hear how the ANWB navigates the challenges of imperfect data in a legacy organization, and then dive into a practical guide for building production-grade AI agentic workflows with Elastic.

A huge thank you to our friends at Elastic for hosting us at their Amsterdam office. Food and drinks will be provided!

We’ll cover:

• ANWB's journey from manual operations to real-world AI predictions.
• Balancing the human and technical challenges of AI innovation.
• A practical guide to building production-grade agentic workflows.
• Integrating LLMs, vector search, and security into a simplified stack.

Speakers 1: Yke Rusticus & David Brummer (ANWB) Yke is a data engineer at ANWB with a background in astronomy and artificial intelligence. In the industry, he learned that AI models and algorithms often do not get past the experimentation phase, leading him to specialise in MLOps to bridge the gap between experimentation and production. As a professional in this field, Yke has developed ML platforms and use cases across different cloud providers, and is passionate about sharing his knowledge through tutorials and trainings.

David is a self-acclaimed “not your typical Data Scientist” who loves analogue photography, vegan food, dogs, and holds an unofficial PhD in thrifting and sourcing second-hand pearls. With a background in growth hacking and experience in the digital marketing trenches of a startup, a scale-up, and a digital agency, he now brings together lean startup thinking, marketing know-how, and sales pitches, blending it all with a passion for creativity and tech at the ANWB. As a bridge between business and data, David focuses on building AI solutions that don’t just work, but actually get used.

Talk: How AI is helping you back on the road We learn at school what AI can do when the data is perfect. We learn at conferences what AI can do when the environment is perfect. In this talk, you'll learn what AI can do when neither is perfect. This story is about the process of overcoming these challenges in an organisation that has been around since the invention of the bike. We'll balance the technical aspect of these solutions with the human aspect throughout the talk. Because in the end, it's not actually AI helping you back on the road, it's people.

Speaker 2: Hans Heerooms (Elastic) Hans Heerooms is a Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic. He has worked in various roles, but always with one objective: helping organisations to get the most out of their data with the least amount of effort. His current role at Elastic is all about supporting Elastic’s customers to help them evolve from data driven decisions to AI guided workflows.

Talk: Building Production-Grade AI Agentic Workflows with Elastic This talk tells and shows how Elastic Agent Builder can help to build and implement agentic workflows. It addresses the complexity of traditional development by integrating all necessary components—LLM orchestration, vector database, tracing, and security—directly into the Elasticsearch Search AI Platform. This talk will show you how to build custom agents, declare and assign tools, and start conversations with your data.

Agenda: 17:45 — Arrival, food & drinks 18:30 — Talk #1 \| Yke & David (ANWB) 19:15 — Short break 19:30 — Talk #2 \| Hans Heerooms (Elastic) 20:15 — Open conversation, networking & more drinks 21:00 — Wrapping up

Please note that the main door will close at 18.00. You will still be able to enter our office, but we might ask you to wait a little bit while we come down to open the door for you.

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. If you're working on MLOps, applied AI, or building agentic workflows, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Who this is for: Data scientists, AI/ML engineers, data engineers, MLOps specialists, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and using real-world AI solutions.

Where to find us: Elastic Amsterdam Keizersgracht 281, 1016 ED Amsterdam

This 21th Eindhoven Data Community meetup will feature two sessions focused on leveraging AI technologies for performance evaluation and operational efficiency. The first session will discuss the challenges of evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) at scale, highlighting the use of LLM-as-a-Judge systems and the implementation of a scalable evaluation framework using Vertex AI and Gemini on Google Cloud. The second session will introduce Menu AI at Just Eat Takeaway, a solution designed to automate the transcription of restaurant menus, significantly reducing the time and effort required for this task. You will learn about the cloud architecture and multimodal models used for parsing menu images and extracting structured data. Overall, the event will showcase innovative strategies for enhancing AI application evaluations and improving operational processes.

Location: Skybar, Microlab Eindhoven, Kastanjelaan 400, Eindhoven.

Evaluating LLM applications at scale As LLM deployments grow, evaluating their performance effectively and efficiently becomes of critical performance. Standard metrics struggle with the heterogeneity of LLM outputs, and manual expert review doesn't scale. LLM-as-a-Judge systems promise automation but require careful implementation to handle specific jargon and ensure alignment with human standards.This session dives into practical solutions for these evaluation challenges, grounded in a large-scale project evaluating a customer-facing chatbot handling over one million conversations per year. We will explore strategies for overcoming both conceptual hurdles (like judge alignment and context awareness) and technical bottlenecks (including cost optimization, data throughput, and robust API interaction). Learn how we leveraged the power of Vertex AI and Gemini on Google Cloud to implement a scalable, reliable, and insightful LLM evaluation framework.

Decoding Culinary Complexity: Transforming Menu Transcription Menu AI at Just Eat Takeaway Step into the shoes of a team faced with the herculean task of transcribing restaurant menus by hand. Each menu, a labyrinth of culinary offerings, can take an excruciating 2-4 hours to decode, demanding unwavering attention to detail amidst a jungle of artistic fonts and intricate designs. Now multiply that by 1700, the number of menus that land on the desks of JET every month only in UK. This is the very pain point that Menu AI promises to alleviate, setting the scene for a transformative solution we're eager to share with you. Join us for an insightful session on how JET integrates restaurant menus into its platform. Our talk will delve into the intricacies of Menu AI, from cloud architecture to the parsing of pictures of restaurant menus and how it and augments the productivity of humans in the loop. We will also get under the hood on how to leverage the power of multimodal models and their vision capabilities on parsing photos, describing menus in structured data, and the importance of mapping relationships among menu items. Moreover, we'll share insights into the significant cost savings realized by the project in Customer Services Operation costs.

Program

• 17:00 – 18:00 Food
• 18:00 – 18:10 Welcome
• 18:10 – 19:00 Sander van Donkelaar: Evaluating LLM applications at scale
• 19:00 – 19:15 Break
• 19:15 – 20:00 Caio Benatti Moretti: Decoding Culinary Complexity: Transforming Menu Transcription with
• 20:00 - 21:00 Drinks

Sander van Donkelaar \| AI/ML Engineer at Xebia Data Sander is an AI/ML Engineer skilled in building AI products and platforms. Experienced across diverse industries, Sander has a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions At the core of Sander's expertise is the ability to translate complex business problems into tangible AI-powered solutions, driving efficiency, innovation, and data-driven decision-making for organizations.

Caio Benatti Moretti \| AI consultant at Xebia Data Caio holds a PhD in Computer Science and has been acting as a DS/MLE both in academia and industry since 2014. Currently working as an AI Consultant at Xebia, he created SlackGPT and is particularly keen on neural networks in its many forms and applications. His enthusiasm even led him to make a neural network fit inside a business card. Apart from practical experience, Caio has been giving seminars and trainings on how to empower businesses with LLMs from use cases to technical tooling. He is focused on how LLMs can augment human productivity and hence helping businesses to leverage novel technologies to achieve their goals.

** Important **: Due to room capacity and building security, you must register on the event website for admission.

Description: Welcome to the GenAI meetup in New York City. Join us for deep dive tech talks on AI, GenAI, LLMs and machine learning, food/drink, networking with speakers and fellow developers.

Agenda: * 5:30pm\~6:00pm: Checkin, Food and networking * 6:00pm\~6:10pm: Welcome/community update * 6:10pm\~8:00pm: Tech talks * 8:00pm: Q&A, Open discussion

Tech Talk: Building a state-of-the-art AI web researcher Speaker: Boris Toledano (COO and Co-founder of Linkup) Abstract: In this session, we'll discuss the next-generation search infrastructure that gives AI agents seamless access to web information and hard-to-find intelligence. Traditional methods can't handle these new workflows, and legacy search engines - designed for human attention - aren't built for these emerging AI use cases. We will address: a)The power of web search for LLM-based applications; b) the need to avoid scraping of legacy search engines; c) How we're building a new category of "searcher" models; and d) What you can power with a web retrieval engine, including demos.

Tech Talk: Building a Self-Improving Agent Speaker: John Gilhuly (Arize AI) Abstract: Agents are powerful—but without feedback, they're flying blind. In this talk, we’ll walk through how to build self-improving agents by closing the loop with evaluation, experimentation, tracing, and prompt optimization. You’ll learn how to capture the right telemetry, run meaningful tests, and apply insights in a way that actually improves performance over time. Whether you’re building copilots, chatbots, or autonomous workflows, this session will give you the practical tools and architecture patterns you need to make your agents smarter—automatically.

Speakers and Topics: Stay tuned as we are updating speakers and schedules. If you have a keen interest in speaking to our community, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: Submit Topics

Sponsors: We are actively seeking sponsors to support our community. Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food/drink, or cash sponsor. Sponsors will not only speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, but also gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 20,000+ AI developers in New York and 500K+ worldwide.

Local and Global AI Community on Discord Join us on discord for local and global AI tech community:

• Events chat: chat and connect with speakers and global and local attendees;
• Learning AI: events, learning materials, study groups;
• Startups: innovation, projects collaborations, founders/co-founders;
• Jobs and Careers: job openings, post resumes, hiring managers. *

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

This is a virtual event.

Register for the Zoom

Vision Language Models Are Few-Shot Audio Spectrogram Classifiers

The development of multimodal AI agents marks a pivotal step toward creating systems Current audio language models lag behind the text-based LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) in reasoning capabilities. Incorporating audio information into VLMs could help us leverage their advanced language reasoning capabilities for audio input. To explore this, this talk will cover how VLMs (such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-sonnet) can recognize audio content from spectrograms and how this approach could enhance audio understanding within VLMs.

About the Speaker

Satvik Dixit is a masters student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professors Bhiksha Raj and Chris Donahue. His research interests are Audio/Speech Processing and Multimodal Learning, with focus on audio understanding and generation tasks. More details can be found at: https://satvik-dixit.github.io/

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey on Agentic RAG

In this talk, we will explore Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or Agentic RAG, a groundbreaking method that enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining intelligent retrieval with autonomous agents. We will discover how Agentic RAG leverages advanced agentic behaviors such as reflection, planning, tool use, and multiagent collaboration to dynamically refine retrieval strategies and adapt workflows, significantly improving real-time responsiveness and complex task management

About the Speaker

Aditi Singh is an Assistant College Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kent State University. She was awarded a prestigious Gold Medal for academic excellence during her undergraduate studies. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLM), and Generative AI. Dr. Singh has published over 25 research papers in these fields.

Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this talk, I will describe an alternative, yet simple approach — active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining.

Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs.

We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.

About the Speaker

Vishaal Udandarao is a third year ELLIS PhD student, jointly working with Matthias Bethge at The University of Tuebingen and Samuel Albanie at Google Deepmind. He did his undergraduate degree in computer science in IIIT Delhi from 2016 to 2020, and his masters in machine learning in The University of Cambridge in 2021.

Dataset Safari: Adventures from 2024’s Top Computer Vision Conferences

Datasets are the lifeblood of machine learning, driving innovation and enabling breakthrough applications in computer vision and AI. This talk presents a curated exploration of the most compelling visual datasets unveiled at CVPR, ECCV, and NeurIPS 2024, with a unique twist – we’ll explore them live using FiftyOne, the open-source tool for dataset curation and analysis.

Using FiftyOne’s powerful visualization and analysis capabilities, we’ll take a deep dive into these collections, examining their unique characteristics through interactive sessions. We’ll demonstrate how to:

• Analyze dataset distributions and potential biases
• Identify edge cases and interesting samples
• Compare similar samples across datasets
• Explore multi-modal annotations and complex label structures

Whether you’re a researcher, practitioner, or dataset enthusiast, this session will provide hands-on insights into both the datasets shaping our field and practical tools for dataset exploration. Join us for a live demonstration of how modern dataset analysis tools can unlock deeper understanding of the data driving AI forward.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.

Join us for part two of Vector search and Graph use cases in SurrealDB! Learn how you can leverage this functionality in your own projects through informative talks with practical examples.

The meetup will highlight:

• The power of knowledge graphs in providing structured and semantically rich context to LLMs, leading to more informed and coherent responses.
• How vector embeddings, numerical representations of text that capture semantic meaning, enable semantic search within the knowledge graph, allowing the system to retrieve the most relevant information for a given query.
• A comparative demonstrating the difference in LLM responses when using:
• A standard prompt referencing source material alone.
• A prompt augmented by the knowledge graph and vector embeddings.

Attendees will gain practical insights into:

• The process of querying a graph-based RAG system for question answering.
• How to leverage the combined capabilities of SurrealDB, a multi-model database.
• Graph Capabilities: Representing relationships between entities within the knowledge graph.
• Vector Capabilities: Enabling semantic search to pinpoint relevant information within the knowledge graph.
• How this approach, utilizing SurrealDB's graph and vector features, enhances LLM responses by providing contextually relevant information retrieved through the knowledge graph.

This meetup is ideal for individuals who attended Part 1 or possess a basic understanding of knowledge graph extraction and are eager to learn advanced techniques for improving LLM outputs using graph-based RAG systems.

🗣️ Speaker opportunity - submit your talk! Working on an interesting project that you would like to share with the community? Submit your talk here.

⏰ Date/time: December 10, 6:30 - 9:00PM

📍 Location: The Yard: Columbus Circle Coworking Office Space NYC

Agenda

18:30 - 19:00 Welcome drinks, pizza & networking Attendees arrive – grab a drink, explore the space and meet the SurrealDB team.

19:00 - 19:30 Improving LLM Responses with Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Vector Search Sandro Pireno, Director Solutions Engineering at SurrrealDB. Building on the foundational concepts of knowledge graph construction from our last meetup in which we extracted knowledge graphs using a large language model (LLM),, this meetup explores advanced techniques for enhancing LLM outputs using graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. The session will showcase how integrating structured knowledge from a knowledge graph, coupled with semantic search powered by vector embeddings, can significantly improve the quality and relevance of LLM-generated responses.

19:30 - 20:00 Refreshments & networking Connect with others in the tech community. Grab a slice of pizza & a drink and chat with other attendees and members of the SurrealDB team.

20:00 - 20:30 How Index Uses SurrealDB with Decentralized Autonomous Agents Description: Explore how Index, a decentralized protocol for peer-to-peer discovery, integrates SurrealDB to enhance its network of autonomous agents. Discover how SurrealDB enables dynamic schemas, context-aware indexing, and seamless collaboration between agents.

20:30 - 21:00 Refreshments and networking

21:00 End of event

-- Host: Alessandro Pireno \| LinkedIn Alessandro is a seasoned product development and solutions leader with a proven track record of building and scaling data-driven solutions across diverse industries. He has led product strategy and development at companies like HUMAN and Omnicom Media Group, optimized data collection and distribution at GroupM, and was an early leader of success at Snowflake. With a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing today’s tech landscape, Alessandro is passionate about empowering organizations to unlock the full potential of their data through innovative database solutions.

Guest speaker: Seref Yarar \| LinkedIn Seref Yarar is the co-founder of Index Network, with 15 years of experience across media, journalism, e-commerce, and ad-tech. His work is shaped by a focus on the semantic web, distributed systems, and decentralized technologies, which influence his approach to information discovery challenges.

--

👉 New to SurrealDB? Get started here.

FAQs

Is the venue accessible? The Yard is located on the 2nd floor. When you arrive, just let security know that you're heading up to The Yard.

Am I guaranteed a ticket at this event? Our events are tech-focused and in the interest of keeping our events relevant and meaningful for those attending, tickets are issued at our discretion. We therefore reserve the right to refund ticket orders before the event and to request proof of identity and/or professional background upon entry.

Is this event for me? SurrealDB events are for software engineers, developers, architects, data scientists, data engineers, or any tech professionals keen to discover more about SurrealDB: a scalable multi-model database that allows users and developers to focus on building their applications with ease and speed.

Are there any House Rules? At SurrealDB, we are committed to providing live and online events that are safe and enjoyable for all attending. Please review our Code of Conduct and Privacy Policy for more information. It is compulsory for all attendees to be registered with a first and last name in order to attend. Any attendees who do not adhere to these requirements will be refused a ticket.

We are discussing the recently released Hands-On Large Language Models by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst. This book combines the essential theory with a practical focus and is written by two highly regarded experts from the LLM space.

This meetup will be to review / discuss the first 2 chapters:

1. An Introduction to Large Language Models
2. Tokens and Embeddings

Book overview Through the book's visually educational nature, readers can learn practical tools and concepts they need to use these capabilities today. You'll understand how to use pretrained large language models for use cases like copywriting and summarization; create semantic search systems that go beyond keyword matching; and use existing libraries and pretrained models for text classification, search, and clusterings. This book purports to help you:

• Understand the architecture of Transformer language models that excel at text generation and representation
• Build advanced LLM pipelines to cluster text documents and explore the topics they cover
• Build semantic search engines that go beyond keyword search, using methods like dense retrieval and rerankers
• Explore how generative models can be used, from prompt engineering all the way to retrieval-augmented generation
• Gain a deeper understanding of how to train LLMs and optimize them for specific applications using generative model fine-tuning, contrastive fine-tuning, and in-context learning

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/.

We are thrilled to invite you to our in-person Meetup in London in collaboration with AND Digital!

Following on from the successful API Summit 2024 event, join this session to learn more about the future of APIs, and the intersection of AI, plus look ahead at what the latest advancements in AI, APIs, Microservices and Kubernetes will mean for you.

When November 14, 18:00 - 20:30

Where 18 Henrietta Street London, WC2E 8QH

Agenda 18:00 - 18:30 Welcome, snacks & Drinks 18:30 - 19:15 API Summit Updates and Recap by Andy Klitovchenko (Sr Solutions Engineer, Kong)

• Key highlights from the recent API Summit
• Discussions on major trends and insights, including advancements in API security, management and new technologies

19:15 - 20:00 AI Ethics 101: A practical guide to applied AI Ethics for Technologists by Sidrah Hassan (AI Ethics Consultant, AND Digital) 20:00 - 20:30 Networking, snacks & drinks

Talks 1) API Summit 2024: Kong News and Announcements Recap - blog post During the Meetup, we will discuss the following exciting news & announcements:

• Kong Konnect is the API Platform for AI
• AI Gateway 3.8: Semantic Caching and Security, New LLM Load-Balancing Algorithms, and More LLMs
• Kong Gateway 3.8: Enhanced Performance, Comprehensive Security, Extensibility, and Ease of Use
• Insomnia 10: Unlimited Collection Runner, Invite Control, and AI Runner for Developers
• Serverless Gateways: Lightweight, Cost-Effective, and Fully Managed Kong Gateways
• Dedicated Cloud Gateways: Deploy Kong Gateways Anywhere — Now With Azure Support
• LLM Analytics in Kong Konnect for GenAI Traffic
• Konnect Service Catalog: Shine a Light on Shadow APIs Lurking in Your IT Infrastructure
• Kong's New Premium Technology Partner Program Elevates Integration Development
• Kong Mesh 2.9: Increased Security Configurations and Health Check Capabilities
• GA Support for Managing Kong with Terraform

2) AI Ethics 101: A practical guide to applied AI Ethics for Technologists A foundational overview of what AI ethics is for technologists, emphasising key principles and frameworks for addressing ethical dilemmas in AI projects. The session highlights the importance of inclusive design, bias mitigation, and stakeholder engagement, empowering attendees to integrate ethical considerations into their work.

Speakers Andy Klitovchenko (Sr Solutions Engineer, Kong) Andrew Klitovchenko is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Kong, a Cloud connectivity company. Andrew helps organisations modernise their API and Service Connectivity governance journeys and make their API and Service Connectivity strategies a competitive advantage. Before his current role, in similar positions, he helped large enterprises with their data streaming and analytics, data privacy and application performance monitoring use cases. Outside of work, Andrew likes playing football, hiking, 3D printing, travelling and exploring new countries and cultures.

Sidrah Hassan (AI Ethics Consultant, AND Digital) Sidrah Hassan is a passionate AI Ethicist on a mission to shape technology for the greater good. With a background spanning across user research and product management Sidrah is dedicated to championing ethical design and implementation. Beyond her role as an AI Ethics Consultant at AND Digital, Sidrah also creates social media content for the BBC, shedding light on both the promises and pitfalls of AI. Through her work, she inspires others to envision a future where AI uplifts humanity and does not hinder it.

See you there! Kong Community Team

** Important RSVP HERE (Due to room capacity and venue security, it is required to pre-register at the link for admission)

Description: Welcome to the AI meetup in Paris. Join us for deep dive tech talks on AI, GenAI, LLMs and machine learning, food/drink, networking with speakers and fellow developers.

Agenda: - 6:30pm\~7:00pm: Checkin\, food and networking - 7:00pm\~9:00pm: Tech talks and Q&A - 9:00pm: Open discussion\, Mixer and Closing.

Tech Talk: From Local to Production: Lessons from Leveraging Open-Source LLMs Speaker: Kemal Toprak Ucar (Numberly) Abstract: In this talk, I will share our journey, which began with local applications leveraging Open-Source LLMs and has now evolved to serve our internal teams. I will dive into the practical lessons we've learned along the way, offering insights that can help you navigate the complexities of LLM implementation.

Tech Talk: Navigating Trust and Transparency Issues in Language Models Speaker: Tom LUCAS and Matthieu Vanhille (Devana) Abstract: This talk dives into the ethics of X.AI, specifically how bias creeps into Large Language Models and what we can do about it. We'll cover both the technical hurdles of bias detection and the real-world impact of biased AI, exploring practical examples and solutions for responsible AI development.

Tech Talk: Beyond blackbox GenAI : Building source-verified legal solutions Speaker: Stéphane Béreux (CTO @ Jimini) Abstract: This talk shows how structured generation fixes this for legal Q&A. By guiding the LLM's output, we can link answers directly to relevant statutes and case law, boosting accuracy and transparency. We'll see how this helps to use LLMs for legal use cases.

Topics/Speakers: Stay tuned as we are updating speakers and schedules. If you have a keen interest in speaking to our community, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: Submit Topics

Sponsors: We are actively seeking sponsors to support AI developers community. Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food, or cash sponsorship. Sponsors will have the chance to speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, and gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 10,000+ AI developers in Paris or 400K+ worldwide.

Community on Slack/Discord

• Event chat: chat and connect with speakers and attendees
• Sharing blogs, events, job openings, projects collaborations *

Register: https://lu.ma/sakz1lmv

If you're passionate about AI, machine learning, data science, or linguistics, this event is for you. Connect with like-minded professionals, share insights, and learn from industry experts as they dive into the real-world applications of LLMs.

​Speakers & Topics: ​Lena Nahorna, Analytical Linguist at Grammarly Topic: Building Frameworks for Evaluation of LLM Output at Grammarly LLMs have opened up new avenues in NLP with their possible applications, but evaluating their output introduces a new set of challenges. In this talk, we discuss how the evaluation of LLMs differs from the evaluation of classic ML-based solutions and how we tackle the challenges.

​Halyna Oliinyk, Senior Data Engineer at Delivery Hero Topic: Data Engineering Workflow Before, After, and For LLMs Halyna will take you through the journey of deploying LLMs into production, focusing on the creation and management of modern data pipelines. She'll cover essential topics like system design, data sources, observability, and monitoring, all backed by real-world examples and common mistakes to avoid.

Djordje Benn-Maksimovic, Senior Data Scientist at Eviden Topic: Cypher Query Building with Open-Source LLMs Djordje will discuss creating knowledge graphs from news articles using small transformers for entity and relation extraction, and automating Cypher queries with open-source LLMs.

Join us for an exciting meetup where we delve into the world of large language models (LLMs) and explore how graph theory can be used to orchestrate efficient and powerful LLM workflows. We will discuss the fundamental building blocks of LLMs and showcase how to leverage the latest open-source models like Gemma, Mistral, and Llama 3 to create intelligent applications that can handle complex requests.

The focus of this meetup will be on the concept of LLM agents and how graph theory can be applied to integrate multiple models seamlessly. We will explore how to design and implement graph-based workflows that enable LLM agents to collaborate and work towards achieving specific tasks. By leveraging the strengths of different models and orchestrating their interactions using graph theory principles, we can unlock advanced use cases and enhance the capabilities of LLM-powered applications.

Throughout the session, we will showcase practical applications of LLM agents across various industries, demonstrating how graph theory can be utilized to optimize workflows and improve efficiency. We will discuss real-world examples and provide insights into the potential benefits of implementing graph-based LLM agent architectures.

Takeaways:

• Understand the building blocks of large language models and how to leverage open-source models like Gemma, Mistral, and Llama 3.
• Learn how to apply graph theory concepts to design and orchestrate LLM workflows, enabling seamless collaboration between multiple models.
• Discover practical applications of LLM agents in various industries and how graph-based architectures can enhance their performance.
• Gain insights into the latest advancements in LLM agent development and explore the potential of graph theory in optimizing LLM workflows.

Whether you are a data scientist, machine learning engineer, or simply curious about the intersection of LLMs and graph theory, this meetup will provide you with valuable knowledge and practical techniques to build harmonious and efficient LLM agent workflows. Join us to explore the exciting possibilities that arise when combining the power of LLMs with the elegance of graph theory!

How to get the most out of your enterprise knowledge graph, common challenges to be aware of, solutions and expected benefits & business cases.

Welcome to the first Connected Data London meetup of 2024! Doors will open at 6.00pm for talks starting at 18.30.

As usual refreshments and food will be available courtesy of our generous sponsors Beamery & Connected Data London.

Special perk for attendees: be the first to know the dates and venue for the upcoming Connected Data London 2024 conference!

Talk & Speakers

1. Knowledge Graphs x LLMs for Human Resources: automating the (once) impossible

Kaan Karakeben, Lead Data Scientist, Beamery

Much has been written about the ability of LLMs and Knowledge Graphs to work hand in hand. On the one hand you have Large Language Models that provide previously unimaginable flexibility and computational intelligence to automate any problem. Yet, without a KG to underpin this knowledge and ensure grounding, LLMs are subject to providing misinformation.

This talk will discuss Beamery’s approach to using LLMs and proprietary AI to “automate the hard stuff” in the HR profession, and how this work is underpinned by KGs.

2. Leveraging LLM and Knowledge Graphs for ESG Analysis

Adam Wangrat, Lead Knowledge Graph Engineer, Neural Alpha

This talk explores how integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and Knowledge Graphs can revolutionize Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) research, disclosure analysis, custom benchmarking and other requirements.

By combining the power of an LLM-based question-answering system with a Neo4j Knowledge Graph containing rich ESG-related data, we can enable more accurate, context-aware, and insightful responses to user queries about ESG factors. Through real-world examples and practical strategies, attendees will learn how this synergy can transform ESG analysis, driving informed decision-making and stakeholder engagement.

3. How Graph RAG and rules-based AI can power expert chatbots and other applications

Nick Form, CTO, Oxford Semantic Technologies Cen Xi Toh, Knowledge Engineer, Oxford Semantic Technologies

This talk will show how to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLM) by implementing a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach using RDFox - a knowledge graph with an embedded semantic reasoner. We’ll demonstrate how this technology can power a chatbot to provide truthful, expert answers to even the most complex questions, using an example everyone can relate to - food!

The demo will concentrate on the use of an LLM in comprehending natural language, initiating function calls, and generating natural language responses. We’ll then cover how the use of rules and reasoning enhances the LLM's understanding and interpretation. The potential for other use cases across a variety of industries will also be explored.

Event timings 18:00 - 18:30 drinks, food & networking 18:30- 18:45 Welcome Beamery & Connected Data London 18:45- 19:15 First talk 19:15 - 19:45 Second talk 19:45 - 20:15 Third talk 20:20 - 21.00 Drinks/Networking 21.00 Event close

Address & building access Beamery, HYLO, 105 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8LZ

Your details will be shared with our event sponsor, Beamery, for communication, health & safety purposes relating to the event only.

You'll get an email with a QR code from Beamery Hylo building reception 4 - 24 hours before the event. Scan the code for entry when you arrive inside the building. If you don't receive the email, reception can print a code on the day if you've registered for a ticket or bring a plus one.

Who are Beamery? Beamery’s Talent Lifecycle Management platform brings together your data on candidates, employees and alumni.

We are an AI-powered platform that powers faster recruiting, successful internal mobility, smarter upskilling and more agile workforce planning so enterprise companies can improve the experience for all talent.

We are a team of creators, problem solvers and engineers. Here from the team directly at Beamery in this video about what life is like in the Engineering, Product & Design Team!

Hear more at 👉Careers.Beamery.com

The next meetup features 2 GenAI talks: (1) fine-tuning image generation models like Stable Diffusion, (2) the transformative impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on customer service.

Agenda: 18:00 - 18:30: Doors open 18:30 - 18:40: Welcome 18:40 - 19:10: Fine-Tune Your Own Stable Diffusion Model - Tips and Tricks Included 19:10 - 19:40: Pizza & Beers 19:40 - 20:10: AI Tools in Action: Enhancing Customer Experience with LLMs at Polestar 20:10 - 21:00: Networking

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Fine-Tune Your Own Stable Diffusion Model - Tips and Tricks Included Daniel Pleus - Data Scientist, Schibsted

Recently, models and tools like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and Dalle-3 have made significant strides in generating high-quality, hyper-realistic images. The innovation doesn't stop with their out-of-the-box capabilities, though. Recent advancements have enabled the fine-tuning of these models on commodity hardware, unlocking new potential for personalized image generation.

In this talk, we'll embark on the practical journey of fine-tuning the Stable Diffusion model with an unexpected protagonist: Otto, Schibsted's plush octopus mascot. Using Stable Diffusion, we send him to faraway countries, place him in historical settings, or change his appearance. You'll discover how Stable Diffusion operates, learn how to fine-tune it with techniques like textual inversion and LoRA, and receive many tips about the optimal settings. We will deep dive into prompts, guidance factors, denoising steps, and random seeds. By the end of this talk, you should feel comfortable conducting your own experiments.

Speakers Bio: Daniel Pleus is a key member of Schibsted's AI Enablement Program as a Data Scientist Lead, where he assists over 60 Schibsted brands in discovering AI use cases and developing prototypes. His recent focus has been on Generative AI, including fine-tuning and deploying models. Before joining Schibsted, Daniel worked in various data and analytics roles and has an academic background in Economics.

Title: AI Tools in Action: Enhancing Customer Experience with LLMs at Polestar Olga Larina - AI & Data Scientist @ Polestar Customer Experience Department

Join me for a presentation where I'll delve into the innovative toolkit that our team has employed to revolutionize customer service. This year, we’ve rolled out our first solution based on a Large Language Model (LLM), and let me tell you—it’s changing the game.

Starting with summarization and information extraction in February 2023, we’ve now set our sights on enhancing our Care Advisors' capabilities with AI that generates responses to customer cases with the precision and expertise of a seasoned professional. Our advisors were excited about our prototype reveal last year. It was clear they were all in, finding the AI support not just cool but also a true timesaver.

In my talk, I will reveal how tools like Langchain’s sophisticated models and chains, and LlamaIndex’s robust vector stores, empower LLMs to excel. Consider this a brief but insightful tour into the technology that’s making our customer service smarter, faster, and way more fun.

I am thrilled to guide you through the varied applications of AI tools that are proving to be incredibly relevant in today's tech landscape. The journey is just beginning, and the pace of development is nothing short of breathtaking. Every day brings new surprises and possibilities. Come and join my talk!

Speakers Bio: At CX, our mission is to mine diverse data types to enhance customer experience, inform business strategy, and streamline operations. Our objectives span traditional data science, including tabular data analysis and natural language processing (NLP). This year, we're delving into the transformative realm of large language models, exploring their vast potential. Previously, I contributed as a Data Scientist at Nexer working on different types of projects including NLP, and CV (Computer Vision), and I have a background in software development, where I engaged in automation testing, analysis, and product ownership. My academic journey began with mathematics at a university in Russia. –

About the event

Date: March 19th, 18:00 - 20:30 Location: Shibsted’s Social Kitchen (Kungsbrohuset, Kungsbron 13, 111 22 Stockholm) Directions: Right next to the central station. Tickets: Sign up required. Anyone who is not on the list will not get in. The event is free of charge. Capacity: Space is limited to 100 participants. If you are signed up but unable to attend, please change your RSVP by February 21st. Food and drinks: Food and drinks will be provided. Questions: Please contact the meetup organizers.

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Code of Conduct The NumFOCUS Code of Conduct applies to this event; please familiarize yourself with it before attending. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct, please contact the organizers.