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Machine Learning

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Guardians of the State: An Air-Gapped AI Fortress for Consumer Data — Rachna Srivastava, DFPI

Guardians of the State: An Air-Gapped AI Fortress for Consumer Data — Rachna Srivastava, DFPI

Rachna Srivastava discusses building a legally defensible AI system for financial fraud detection, emphasizing that generative AI has eroded traditional trust. Her team at DFPI engineered an offline, hardware-secured data pipeline using Kafka, Spark, and semantic routing to ensure explainability, reproducibility, and auditability. They implemented a one-way data diode for secure learning and Apache Iceberg for time-travel queries, asserting that "trust is a physical property" built into the system's core.

Invited Research Talk: Measuring Generalization in EEG Foundation Models

Invited Research Talk: Measuring Generalization in EEG Foundation Models

This talk presents a multi-dimensional evaluation and interpretability framework for EEG foundation models. It reveals that current models often fail to outperform supervised baselines for BCI tasks, lack robustness to sparse channels, and exhibit an aperiodic low-frequency bias, making them better at capturing subject-specific rather than task-specific information. The analysis highlights critical deficiencies and suggests future directions for pre-training objectives and data collection to improve generalization.

Can LLMs Write Fast Multi-GPU Kernels? — Simran Arora, Together AI

Can LLMs Write Fast Multi-GPU Kernels? — Simran Arora, Together AI

Simran Arora discusses the critical bottleneck shift in large AI workloads from GPU compute to inter-GPU communication. Her team's solution, ParallelKittens, offers a set of primitives to optimize multi-GPU kernels by leveraging fundamental transfer mechanisms and compute-communication overlapping. They introduce ParallelKernelBench, a benchmark to evaluate AI models' ability to generate such kernels, revealing that while models can handle syntax, they struggle with deeper reasoning about communication patterns and hardware trade-offs.

Artificial Intelligence

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AI-Native Organisations Run on Skills: How to Structure and Scale Them — Imad Touil, QuantumBlack

AI-Native Organisations Run on Skills: How to Structure and Scale Them — Imad Touil, QuantumBlack

Imad Touil explores the critical need for governing AI skills within organizations, asserting that skills represent the true repository of enterprise know-how. He contrasts simplified coding agent loops with complex, real-world product lifecycles, demonstrating how ungoverned skills lead to technical debt—including duplication, quality degradation, security risks, and lack of discoverability. Proposing a microservices-inspired approach, Touil outlines a centralized skills platform and human-led governance model essential for achieving deterministic workflows, boosting productivity, and mitigating risks in AI-native enterprises.

Your Code Has Bugs. Lean4 Has Proofs: Formal Verification for Engineers — Varun Pant, AWS

Your Code Has Bugs. Lean4 Has Proofs: Formal Verification for Engineers — Varun Pant, AWS

Varun Pant introduces formal verification as the solution to reliably validate AI-generated code, proposing a division where humans define specifications and machines handle code and proof. He details Lean's role as a unified language for code and proof, exemplified by an AI rewriting zlib with 32,000 lines of proof, and AWS's Cedar using Lean specs with Rust production code reconciled by 100 million nightly tests. The talk also covers deductive verification with solvers and future cross-language verification with Strata, aiming for "provably correct" software.

How to Get Your Org to Adopt Coding Agents (Without Shipping Garbage) — Eyal Blum, Figma

How to Get Your Org to Adopt Coding Agents (Without Shipping Garbage) — Eyal Blum, Figma

Figma's internal AI agent adoption journey faces challenges like reduced developer agency, skepticism from senior engineers, and communication inefficiency. Solutions include investing in verification, using a testing pyramid for agent review, prioritizing detailed planning over prompting, engaging skeptics to build AI safety roadmaps, and implementing attention-aware communication by clearly marking AI-generated content.

Technology

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Platform Engineering for Developers, Architects & the Rest of Us • Daniel Bryant • GOTO 2025

Platform Engineering for Developers, Architects & the Rest of Us • Daniel Bryant • GOTO 2025

Daniel Bryant discusses platform engineering for software developers and architects, emphasizing treating platforms as internal products with developers as customers. He outlines a three-layered architecture, the evolution from monolithic systems to microservices, and the importance of 'golden bricks' over 'golden paths' for composability. Key takeaways include API-first design, minimizing cognitive load, avoiding leaky abstractions, and measuring success through frameworks like DORA and DevEx to achieve speed, safety, and scale.

Modern Enterprise Architecture: Architecting for Outcomes • Simon Rohrer • GOTO 2025

Modern Enterprise Architecture: Architecting for Outcomes • Simon Rohrer • GOTO 2025

Simon Rohrer challenges traditional Enterprise Architecture (EA) principles, proposing a modern approach focused on outcomes, continuous evolution, and socio-technical alignment. He outlines five key tenets: Aligning Value, People & Technology; achieving Better Value Sooner, Safer, Happier; implementing Continuous Conversational & Automated Governance; scaling DevOps across the enterprise; and fostering Evolutionary Enterprise Architecture.

Elon's Former Battery Chief on Making Transformers 100x Smaller | Drew Baglino, Heron Power

Elon's Former Battery Chief on Making Transformers 100x Smaller | Drew Baglino, Heron Power

Drew Baglino, former Tesla Powertrain & Energy head and now CEO of Heron Power, reveals why the current electricity grid is inadequate for the explosive growth of AI data centers. He explains how Heron Power's wideband gap power semiconductors will revolutionize grid-to-chip infrastructure, cutting power losses by half, shrinking massive transformers by 100x, and transforming data centers into grid-positive assets for a more efficient and sustainable energy future.


Recent Post

Context Engineering for Coding Agents

Context Engineering for Coding Agents

A deep dive into advanced engineering techniques for coding agents, focusing on effective context management in LLMs like Claude. The talk introduces a practical framework using a brain-inspired analogy, proposing a Markdown-based 'wiki' as a long-term memory system to augment the agent's limited context window. This approach is demonstrated through a real-world challenge of extracting structured data from technical drawings.

Cloud, Containers & Security • Adrian Mouat, Kief Morris & Sam Newman • GOTO 2025

Cloud, Containers & Security • Adrian Mouat, Kief Morris & Sam Newman • GOTO 2025

In this panel discussion, experts Adrian Mouat, Kief Morris, and Sam Newman delve into the current landscape of cloud technology, container security, and infrastructure automation. They cover key topics such as supply chain security with Sigstore and SBOMs, the practical impact of AI on deterministic systems, the ongoing debate about cloud repatriation, and advanced Infrastructure as Code practices like TDD and managing configuration drift.

Uncertainty-Guided Data Augmentation for Engineers | Deep Dive - Yongmin Kwon

Uncertainty-Guided Data Augmentation for Engineers | Deep Dive - Yongmin Kwon

This session details a data-efficient method for training engineering surrogate models by using uncertainty quantification (UQ) to guide geometric data augmentation. Instead of random deformations, the approach lets the deep ensemble model identify its own knowledge gaps (epistemic uncertainty), then uses Free-Form Deformation (FFD) to generate new shapes specifically in those uncertain regions. This ensures every expensive simulation run yields maximally informative data, significantly improving model accuracy for a fixed computational budget across domains like structural mechanics and aerodynamics.

Stop Making Models Bigger, Make Them Behave — Kobie Crawdord, Snorkel

Stop Making Models Bigger, Make Them Behave — Kobie Crawdord, Snorkel

Snorkel.ai's research demonstrates how a 4-billion-parameter model, fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning for under $500, significantly outperformed a 235-billion-parameter model on financial analysis tool-use tasks. The key was cultivating 'tool discipline' and error correction capabilities, rather than relying on sheer model size or deeper reasoning. Single-table training generalized effectively to harder multi-table problems, emphasizing the importance of targeted behavioral fixes identified through detailed evaluation rubrics.

Sovereign Escape Velocity: Ownership w Open Models — Gus Martins, & Ian Ballantyne, Google DeepMind

Sovereign Escape Velocity: Ownership w Open Models — Gus Martins, & Ian Ballantyne, Google DeepMind

Google DeepMind's Ian Ballantyne and Gus Martins introduce Gemma 4, a family of open models delivering state-of-the-art performance with remarkable size efficiency. They discuss how models like the 31B variant outperform competitors 2-20x its size while running on a single GPU, the shift to an Apache 2.0 license to foster sovereignty and adoption, and the new economics of running powerful agentic workloads on hardware ranging from a Pixel phone to a single enterprise GPU.

From Transcription to Live Music: Gemini's Audio Stack — Thor Schaeff, Google DeepMind

From Transcription to Live Music: Gemini's Audio Stack — Thor Schaeff, Google DeepMind

Thor Schaeff from Google DeepMind demos the advanced audio AI stack, starting with a single API call to Gemini for rich transcription (speaker names, emotions, translation). He showcases speech generation directed by "director's notes" instead of a voice catalog, the real-time, sound-to-sound Gemini 1.5 Flash Live model, and a live demo of Gemini Live using the Lyria 2 model as a tool to generate a full song on stage.

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