Changan Chen, co-founder of Rhoda AI, discusses their vision-first approach to building foundation models for robotics. The conversation covers their unique training pipeline, the distinction between policy and world models, and the path to deploying data-efficient, reliable robots in real-world industrial settings.
Java Champion Ben Evans provides a data-driven analysis of Java's health in 2026, arguing against its perceived decline. He covers its robust ecosystem, the core tension between dynamism and integrity, its evolving role in AI, and a detailed roadmap including Project Valhalla and the Vector API.
Marcin Grzejszczak, a Java Champion and Spring Cloud Contract contributor, discusses how a production-breaking typo led to the creation of Spring Cloud Contract. He outlines an AI-powered future for contract testing, leveraging production traffic and OpenAPI specs to generate and validate contracts automatically. Marcin also emphasizes that 'context' is the most underrated pillar of observability, transforming raw logs, metrics, and traces into actionable insights.
Max Hodak, co-founder of Neuralink and founder of Science, discusses the company's retinal implant that restores sight, the concept of the brain as a computer with a definable API, the surprising parallels between neural representations and latent spaces in AI, and the future of bio-hybrid interfaces.
Alfred Malingo discusses the unique position of Swahili in AI, arguing that its structural similarities to other Bantu languages make it a far more effective pivot language than English for developing inclusive and accurate models. He deconstructs the failures of typologically mismatched transfer from Indo-European languages and presents a case study, AfriMT-a, to demonstrate how Swahili can serve as a technical bridge for machine translation and representation learning across the Bantu language family.
A panel discussion with Spring Framework creator Rod Johnson and veteran Arjen Poutsma, moderated by Trisha Gee. They discuss the evolution of Spring, the future of reactive programming in the age of virtual threads, their new AI agent framework Embabel, and the essential AI skills modern Java developers need to acquire.