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We're excited to invite you to Graph Minds: Exploring Agentic Memory and Self-Improving AI, a special meetup co-hosted with the London Java Community at Microsoft Reactor!

Join fellow graph enthusiasts, Neo4j developers and members of the Java community as we dive into cutting-edge topics like composable agentic memory and building self-improving AI agents with graph-based architectures. Let’s connect, learn, and explore how graphs are powering the next generation of intelligent systems.

Session 1: Title: Building Self-Improving AI Agents with MCP and Graph-Based Memory Speaker: Opemipo Disu, Latitude

Abstract: Autonomous AI agents are becoming more capable by the day, but how do we enable them to learn from experience and continuously evolve? In this talk, we'll explore how to build self-improving AI agents using the MCP (Memory-Cognition-Planning) architecture, integrated with Latitude to represent and reason over long-term memory. You’ll see how graphs can provide structured memory storage for agentic systems, support retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG), and facilitate feedback loops that help agents adapt to new environments and goals. Expect a live demo and actionable insights for building smarter, more context-aware AI systems.

Session 2: Title: Composable Agentic Memory - from Local State to Institutional Knowledge Speaker: Andreas Kollegger, Neo4j

Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please).

Håkan Silfvernagel | Most Valuable Professionals How to enhance your own AI services using Semantic Kernel Did you know that you can combine various AI services such as Open AI, Azure Open AI and Hugging Face in your own custom application? In this session you will learn how you can build your own Copilot experience using the Semantic Kernel which is released as an open source project. I will demonstrate how you can use skills, memories, connectors and plugins in order to enhance the experience for your users. This session is a developer focused session meaning that you do not need to have any AI knowledge in order to benefit from the examples demonstrated in the session.

Alex Pearce | Most Valuable Professionals and Lewis Baybutt | Most Valuable Professionals The evolution of AI Agents and the Microsoft AI Architecture Join MVPs Alex Pearce and Lewis Baybutt for an insightful session on the transformative world of AI agents within Microsoft 365. This event will delve into the advancements in agentic AI, showcasing the diverse capabilities of Microsoft 365 agents for both low-code creators and professional developers. Attendees will also gain insights into the extensive Microsoft AI Architecture, with a focus on Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and elements of Azure AI Foundry. This session promises to equip participants with the knowledge to effectively navigate and leverage the full spectrum of AI tools in their AI journey.

Details Our London AI DevOps Society meetup 2025 has arrived! We are delighted to partner with Microsoft on this exciting meetup, with two exciting speakers lined up.

Format of the meetup event will be as follows:

6pm – 6:30pm - Networking on arrival coupled with food and soft drinks provided by ReVybe IT and Microsoft.

6:30pm - 7:45pm - 2X 25 minute speakers lined up with 10-15 minute break in-between

7:45pm onwards - Networking (carries on afterwards for anybody who wants to have a few drinks or just socialise at The Union, Paddington)

#1 Matteo Emili, Director of Software Engineering @ Avanade UK & Ireland

Matteo Emili is a Director of Software Engineering at Avanade UK and Ireland, leading the talent in Software Engineering and always looking at new ways of applying technology to solve business problems. He is a passionate Agile advocate and a technologist at heart, a Cloud Architect who is always driven by using technology as a vehicle for change and continuous improvement.

A Microsoft MVP since 2010 (currently in the Azure DevOps and GitHub category), he enjoys sharing back as much as he can with the worldwide technical communities – especially within Agile and DevOps. He has founded several User Groups around Europe and he is a regular speaker at meetups and conferences.

Title: Is AI going to change the role of a Developer?

GenAI here, Copilot there… AI is a once in a lifetime opportunity to significantly change the way people operate, however nobody is talking about how AI is changing the role of a developer today, and the impact in the future. Let’s shed some light on the role of a developer in an AI-assisted world and see how to make the most of the opportunity.

#2 Liam Hampton, Senior Cloud Advocate @ Microsoft Liam is a Senior Cloud Advocate and Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Developer Tools. He is passionate about Security, DevOps, automation and Go. He loves sharing his knowledge and creating simple and concise content for others to learn from. When he is not writing code in the office, he is writing it on a beach as he spends a lot of his time traveling around the globe, building communities and meeting new people.

Title: Deploying AI Agents with the Azure Developer CLI (azd) In this session you will learn about the evolution of AI Agents. Liam will take you through what they are, how they are used and how to deploy them using the Azure Developer CLI. The azd CLI is an open source deployment tool that utilises ready made templates in Bicep and Terraform to make your journey to the cloud simple and efficient. Please provide full name and email address for access to the Microsoft Reactor event space in Paddington.

Address: 2 Kingdom St, London W2 6BD

In this meetup, we welcome Ben Weiner to speak about PivotTables, and more importantly, data model PivotTables.

What to expect PivotTables are great for easily summarizing data but are linked to one large data table that contains all the data to be analysed, so as the data grows or becomes more complex so do the limitations of PivotTables.

Power Pivot takes this to the next level by replacing one big data table with a data model using tables from multiple data sources and creating relationships between the tables.

This presentation will go over how to go from formatting data from a single table in a PivotTable to creating a relational data model in Power Pivot, including the use of Power Query and DAX to provide data analysis and insights that would not be possible with a PivotTable.

About Ben Ben is a Chartered Management Accountant who has been working in finance for over ten years. Initially working in accounting roles he now works in FP&A using advanced Excel features and Power BI to analyse financial data and build financial models, accounts and budgets.

This event will be held at the Microsoft Reactor in London.

In this meetup, Myles Arnott, co-founder of Full Stack Modeller and Fractional Finance Director will explain how using Excel Tables will completely transform the way that you model. Following an initial overview of how Excel Tables work Myles will compare an Excel Table based model and a cell-based model to highlight why we should all be modelling using Excel Tables.

This is a strict in-person ONLY event and will be held at the Microsoft Reactor in London.

Please only RSVP if you are attending and spaces are limited. We look forward to seeing you.

Agenda 📣📣We are happy to announce the 53rd PyData Cambridge meetup!📣📣 Agenda: 18:45 - 🚪 Doors open (Please do not arrive earlier) 19:00 - ▶️ Introduction 19:15 - 🗣 Image Registration: How to align images, by Mayank Patwari, Astra Zeneca. 19:50 - 🍕 Interval - pizza and drinks provided 20:15 - 🗣Data-driven optimization for expensive problems: a chemical reactor case study, by Antonio del Rio Chanona, Imperial College London. 20:50 - 🍻 End (Pub - Station Tavern, Station Square, map here).

This event is sponsored by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. ----------------------------------------------------------------

Abstracts

Image Registration: How to align images, by Mayank Patwari Image registration, the process of aligning two images with identical or overlapping content, is a ubiquitous challenge in various domains today. From seamlessly stitching together images to craft panoramic views to capturing objects in 3D through scanning, the applications of image registration are manifold and impactful. This talk will delve into the fundamental mathematical principles and essential methodologies underpinning image registration techniques. Moreover, it will explore compelling real-world applications, showcasing the diverse range of scenarios where image registration plays a pivotal role.

Data-driven optimization for expensive problems: a chemical reactor case study Antonio del Rio Chanona The rise of digitalization, including smart measuring devices, analytical technology, sensor technologies, cloud platforms, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), has led to the emergence of data-driven optimization. Optimization algorithms that are guided purely by collected data are now in high demand. In this talk, we will discuss Bayesian optimization, a data-driven optimization algorithm, and its application to solving "expensive" optimization problems.

Expensive data-driven optimization problems are those with high costs, such as neural network hyperparameter tuning, expensive computer simulations, and chemical experiments. These costs can be computational time, monetary, or any other budget. Our focus will be on the design of chemical reactors coupled with computational fluid dynamics simulations and their manufacturability via 3D printing.

We will explore how Bayesian optimization can be used to optimize chemical reactor design and improve their performance while reducing costs. By leveraging data-driven optimization algorithms, we can achieve more efficient and sustainable chemical processes. This talk will provide insights into the potential of Bayesian optimization for engineering systems.

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Speakers Bios

Mayank is a dedicated scientist with a diverse skill set encompassing computer vision, biomedical engineering, machine learning, and medical physics. He earned his Master's degree in Biomedical Computing from TU Munich and completed his Bachelor's degree at the University of Hong Kong. Mayank's research primarily focuses on machine learning applications in computer vision and medical imaging, resulting in several noteworthy publications. One of his papers was recognized as among the top 10% most read papers in the years 2023-2024 by the prestigious journal Medical Physics, highlighting his contributions to the field.

Antonio del Rio Chanona is head of the Optimisation and Machine Learning for Process Systems Engineering group at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London.

Antonio received his MEng from UNAM in Mexico, and his PhD from the University of Cambridge where he was awarded the Danckwerts-Pergamon Prize for the best doctoral thesis of his year. Antonio’s main research interests include Data-Driven Optimisation, Reinforcement Learning, Control and Hybrid Modelling applied to process systems engineering. ----------------------------------------------------------------

Code of Conduct PyData is dedicated to providing a harassment-free event experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. The PyData Code of Conduct governs this meetup. ( http://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html ) To discuss any issues or concerns relating to the code of conduct or the behaviour of anyone at a PyData meetup, please contact NumFOCUS Executive Director Leah Silen ([email protected]) or organizers.

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please).

Agenda

6:00 PM - Arrivals: Registration and welcoming of guests 6:30 PM - 6:40 PM - Welcome Address 6:40 PM - 7:00 PM - Understanding AI: build your own enterprise ChatGPT with LangChain4J by Sandra Ahlgrimm 7:00 PM - 7:30 PM - Break 7:30 PM – 7:50 PM - Deploying a Python Web App with Azure by Marlene Mhangami 7:50 PM - 8:10 PM - Accelerating Development: Harnessing Service Bus and Azure Functions for Event-Driven Solutions by Chandan Bhagat 8:10 PM - 8:45 PM - Networking / Questions & Closing

Session Descriptions:

Understanding AI: build your own enterprise ChatGPT with LangChain4J

In this session we will build a chatbot from based on OpenAI models and implementing the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern. Using a reference document database, the model will be able to answer questions in natural language and generate complete, sourced responses from your documents. To do this, we will create a Quarkus service based on the open-source LangChain4J framework and a website to test our chatbot.

Accelerating Development: Harnessing Service Bus and Azure Functions for Event-Driven Solutions

In this session, dive into the world of event-driven development with Service Bus and Azure Functions. Discover how to leverage these powerful Azure services to create robust, scalable, and responsive applications that react to events in real-time. We'll start by exploring the fundamentals of event-driven architecture and how it enables loosely coupled and highly scalable systems. You'll learn how Service Bus acts as the backbone of event communication, allowing seamless publishing and consuming of events across your application. Next, we'll delve into Azure Functions and understand how they can be used to process events triggered by Service Bus. We'll walk through real-world scenarios and explore best practices for designing and implementing event-driven solutions using Azure Functions.

Throughout the session, you'll gain practical insights and tips for designing resilient architectures, handling message processing, and optimizing performance. Whether you're building microservices, IoT applications, or real-time analytics pipelines, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to accelerate your development with event-driven architecture on Azure.

Update on 18th-Feb Everybody who completed the building registration form should now have received an email with a visitor pass and barcode to scan at the barriers. This email comes from "2 Kingdom Street Appointments", the address of Microsoft's office in London. The invites is for a meeting at Microsoft on Monday 19 February at 17:00 at 2 Kingdom Street, London W2 6BD. The talk starts at 6pm but please arrive any time from 5:30pm. See you tomorrow.

Power BI is one of the anchor products within the Microsoft Power Platform. In this session we'll see a number of scenarios where it can be used to work with Power Automate and Power Apps in order to get the most out of this wonderful product.

Along the way we'll see how to use Power Automate to:

• Trigger a dataset refresh
• Create an email with the latest data included

In addition to this we'll see how simple it is to:

• Add a Power BI report to a model driven app
• Configure the Power Apps Power BI control to deliver a revolving status dashboard

Speaker Bio Rory is a freelance Power Platform Trainer and consultant, and has been working in the Power Platform since the early days of Power BI and has trained people across Europe in that time, from Italy up to Iceland and from Ireland across to Finland and his courses have been viewed worldwide.

An accountant by trade, he is the founder of www.powerplatformlearn.academy and powerapps4kids.com and has worked both as a contractor, trainer and a consultant in the Power Platform space for many years.

Rory is a Microsoft Business Applications MVP, MCT and Qualified ACA. He has been active in the community as a presenter, blogger and vlogger and is always looking for new opportunities to create simple value when using Power Platform.

Note the new location for this event: the new Microsoft Reactor at their Paddington office, Paddington Central, 2 Kingdom St, London, W2 6BD. (Please remember the old location in Shoreditch is closed!)

Building security rules for the event location mean that we had to provide full names and email addresses of all attendees 3 days before the event. They are super strict about this. We have sent off the list to Microsoft and have closed the form and have emailed all those people who completed the form to confirm that they are registered.

Important: If you do not register with the registration form, please do not come. Signing up on meetup is not enough. Microsoft building security will not admit you without registration unfortunately.

Please register here for the meetup: Events \| Microsoft Reactor

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please).

DevOps meets AI

DevOps is inherently a cultural shift with a mass of technologies involved at many stages of the lifecycle. Over the past year we have seen a huge change in the AI sector and this developers, entrepreneurs and businesses are all stating to adopt this technology and make it a part of their everyday development. With this being the case, the DevOps lifecycle is going to pivot and change for everyone in one way or another so lets dive into how this is happening!

Agenda

6:30PM – 6:40PM: Welcome by Liam Hampton, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft 6:40PM – 7:00PM: GitHub Copilot throughout the development lifecycle, Chris Reddington, Senior Manager, Developer Advocacy at GitHub 7:00PM – 7:20PM: LLMOps - Building Skills for the AI World, Aravind Putrevu, Dev GTM Advisor at SurrealDB 7:20PM – 7:50PM: Break 7:50PM – 8:15PM: TBC

Session Descriptions

GitHub Copilot throughout the development lifeycle

With decreasing budgets, growing backlogs, increasing responsibility and complexity, ensuring our engineering teams have a great development experience has never been more important. Join Chris, as he shows how GitHub Copilot can support you throughout your development lifecycle.

LLMOps - Building Skills for the AI World

We have all been through the DevOps wave that affected many platforms and technology. With Generative AI, most of the built workflows, automation and experiences are being revolutionised. Aravind will unravel the intricate relationship between LLMOps and traditional DevOps, highlighting the revolutionary impact of AI-enabled experiences on various aspects of DevOps including Observability (with a focus on the context of Logs, Metrics, and Traces in LLMs), FinOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Security.

Important: If you did not register with the registration form, please do not come. Signing up on meetup is not enough. Microsoft building security will not admit you without registration unfortunately.

Building security rules for the event location mean that we had to provide full names and email addresses of all attendees 3 days before the event. They are super strict about this. We have sent off the list to Microsoft and have closed the form and have emailed all those people who completed the form to confirm that they are registered.

The year is nearly over and Power BI has powered ahead with lots of new and improved features. I will demo some of my personal favourite new capabilities including:

• on-object editing makes formatting our visual so much fun
• calculation groups are now in Power BI Desktop, and are so useful
• the all-singing, all-dancing new card visual
• lots of improvements to charts: leader lines and smoothed lines, better bubble sizing,..
• the DAX WINDOW() makes writing time intelligence functions easier
• dynamic format strings for measures – a real help for scorecard situations
• the improved Azure maps visual

Note the new location for this event: the new Microsoft Reactor at their Paddington office, Paddington Central, 2 Kingdom St, London, W2 6BD. (Please remember the old location in Shoreditch is closed!)

REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS EVENT ARE NOW CLOSED

London Reactor Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning.

Hi Everyone, it is with great pleasure we announce the return of the London Reactor Meetup at our NEW location in the Microsoft Paddington office. This event will be AI focused and we have some amazing speakers lined up and ready to share their insights and expertise with you.

The new location address is: Paddington Central 2 Kingdom St London W2 6BD

IMPORTANT: Please do NOT turn up to our old location as this is now closed and you will be sorely missed.

This is a great opportunity for you to connect with community leaders, developers and Microsoft MVP’s so come along and let’s have some fun!

Please note – Entry is on first come first serve basis so please RSVP & Arrive early to join in!

6:00PM - Doors Open (we will welcome you in the building lobby) 6:30PM - 6:35PM - Welcome by Liam Hampton , Sr. Cloud Advocate & Ravneet Khokhar, Reactor PM 6:35PM - 7:15PM - Nikhil Sehgal, AI Engineer & CEO/Founder of Vastmindz - Utilising AI agents to Teach LLMs, such as Azure OpenAI's GPT-family, to Interact & Take Actions in the Real-world 7:15PM - 7:30PM - Break (food 🍕) 7:30PM - 8:00PM – Amy Boyd, Principal Cloud Advocate, Microsoft, AI without Data is like Bonny without Clyde

Session 1: Utilising AI agents to Teach LLMs, such as Azure OpenAI's GPT-family, to Interact & Take Actions in the Real-world by Nikhil Sehgal

The main goal of this session is to delve deep into the intricacies of using AI agents to train LLMs (like the GPT-family hosted on Azure OpenAI) to not just respond to queries, but to interact with real-world environments and execute tasks seamlessly. For example, AI agents can go and execute tasks autonomously for regular IT support queries or sales queries. Businesses will eventually be able to "hire" these AI agents to fulfil an entire workflow. The space of AI agents is still very early, although it is arguably going to be one of the most impactful applications of AI.

Session 2: AI without Data is like Bonny without Clyde by Amy Boyd

In this session the core message is, don't forget about your data. AI is taking another huge leap in its journey, allowing us to be more efficient and productive in everything we do - its really exciting times! But AI workloads without data considerations could leave you in a difficult position. Lets chat about:

Preparing your data platform to enable building amazing AI applications Bringing cutting edge models into the Microsoft Fabric experience How has responsible AI moved on in the age of Generative AI?

REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS EVENT ARE NOW CLOSED