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Hello everyone! As always a big thank you to all who attended our first Data & AI London meet up of the year in March.. Of course a big thank you to Katia Gil Guzman of OpenAI too for taking the time to join us and kick off the year of meet ups perfectly!

Now its time to keep things rolling and announce our next event for May! For this event we welcome back one of the fan favourites Holly Smith from Databricks who gave an awesome talk last year and Tom Stuart founding engineer of PortiaAI, an open source framework that allows developers to spin up AI agents.

Tom Stuart \| Founding Engineer @ PortiaAI Architecting multi agent systems for reliability 2025 is purportedly the year of Agents, autonomous systems able to accomplish a vast swathe of tasks which were previously unheard of for AI. At the same time, many naysayers are citing difficulties in running agents in production due to reliability concerns. In this talk, we'll look at some of the difficulties in creating these systems, and what the trends are in the industry that address them, as well as our own experience building these systems at Portia AI.

About me Tom is the founding engineer at Portia AI, helping to build a multi-agent SDK with a strong focus on reliability and authentication. Before founding Portia, he served as CTO at a fintech startup and has held a range of roles across the software industry — including working on the Security team at Monzo. His experience spans infrastructure, product, and leadership, all with a deep emphasis on building secure, scalable systems.

Holly Smith \| Staff Developer Advocate @ Databricks The Metadata Marathon: How Three Storage Projects are Racing Forward With the enormous amount of discussion about open storage formats between nerds and even not-nerds, it can be hard to keep track of who’s doing what and how this actually makes any impact on day to day data projects. I want us to take a closer look at the three big projects in this space; Delta, Hudi and Iceberg. They’re all trying to solve for similar data problems and have tackled the various challenges in different ways. This talk with start with the very basics of how we got here, what the history is before diving deep into the underlying tech, their roadmaps and their impacts on the data landscape as a whole.

About me Holly Smith is a multi award winning Data and AI expert who has over a decade of experience working with Data and AI teams in a variety of capacities from individual contributors all the way up to leadership. In her role at Databricks she has worked with many multi national companies as they embark on their journey to the cutting edge of data. She is a renowned public speaker, teacher and minority in tech advocate.

Please aim to arrive at 6pm. The talks will start around 6.30pm (give or take a few mins) and there will be pizza and refreshments as always on arrival :)

Look forward to seeing you all soon!

Join us on Wednesday 22nd May for the FIRST OpenUK Online Meetup, our online-only event for OpenUK community members.

This will be a lunch-time webinar, where you'll get to hear from maintainers about their highs and lows about working in the open, which ties into May being GitHub's Maintainer Month. The event will not be recorded.

We're very excited to hear from:

- Lorna Mitchell (OpenAPI Specification, rst2pdf, redocly) - Ben Hutton (JSON Schema) - Tom Akehurst (Wiremock and the wider Wiremock ecosystem) - Stuart Lowe (UK Constituency Data) - Autumn Skerritt (rustscan, ciphey, HashPals and more!) - Charlie Egan (OpenPolicyAgent) - Jamie Tanna (oapi-codegen)

Agenda: 1200 Start 1205 Let's hear from maintainers about the joys and not-so-joyous parts of maintaining 1245 Questions 1300 End

By registering the attendee confirms their acceptance of OpenUK’s privacy policy [https://openuk.uk/privacy-policy/]

By attending this or any OpenUK event, you are adhering to our Code of Respect and OpenUK’s Competition Policy. Please read ahead.If you would like to hear more about OpenUK’s other events, you can join our Newsletter.