SF Machine Learning Meetup

Aug 11, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST
Online. Register for the Zoom!

As robotics and autonomous vehicle teams move from traditional perception models to end-to-end Physical AI systems, understanding model behavior is becoming harder than ever. These models ingest synchronized inputs from cameras, sensors, and other data streams, but their decisions can be difficult to explain, reproduce, and improve.

You’ll learn how to use multimodal data to investigate questions like: when did the model swerve, miss an object, misinterpret a scene, or behave unexpectedly — and how can you find every similar moment across your dataset?

Designed for robotics, AV, and machine learning teams, this session will show how FiftyOne helps turn multimodal data into a scalable workflow for model evaluation, debugging, and improvement.

Aug 13, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST
Online. Register for the Zoom!

We’ll walk through how modern agentic systems move beyond simple prompts—leveraging structured tools like dataset operations, embeddings, evaluation pipelines, and model execution to take real action. You’ll see how these agents can tag data, run inference, evaluate performance, and surface insights automatically, all within a unified workflow.

By combining natural language interfaces with programmable building blocks, teams can dramatically reduce manual effort, accelerate experimentation, and unlock faster decision-making across the ML lifecycle.

Whether you're building data-centric AI systems, managing large-scale vision datasets, or exploring agentic workflows for the first time, this session will give you a practical blueprint for getting started.

About the Speaker

Adonai Vera - Machine Learning Engineer & DevRel at Voxel51. With over 7 years of experience building computer vision and machine learning models using TensorFlow, Docker, and OpenCV. I started as a software developer, moved into AI, led teams, and served as CTO. Today, I connect code and community to build open, production-ready AI, making technology simple, accessible, and reliable.

In this hands-on workshop, you'll use FiftyOne to run the full rare-class mining loop end-to-end on a large unlabeled image pool: compress the pool with near-duplicate detection, embed images with a modern vision backbone, mine candidate positives via seeded similarity from a tiny labeled set, confirm them through targeted human review, and prioritize the survivors for annotation using representativeness and uniqueness scores.

Time, Date and Location

Aug 20, 2026
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM PST, 2026
Online. Register for the Zoom!

What You'll Walk Away With

• A working FiftyOne pipeline for finding rare classes in any visual dataset you own
• A repeatable four-stage funnel — compress, mine, confirm, prioritize — with a clear objective at each stage
• A fine-tuned detector that demonstrably outperforms one trained on the same number of randomly sampled images
• The mental model that data curation — not architecture or hyperparameters — is the highest-leverage thing you can do to improve a rare-class detector

Aug 25, 2026
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM PST
Online. Register for the Zoom!

Using Computer Vision to Advance the Sciences

I'll present some of our ongoing work on using computer vision to create impact in the sciences. These target a two areas, solar physics and evolutionary biology, that deal with objects of radically different sizes but are unified by a need for high quality, trustworthy data.

I'll show off our efforts, done in collaboration with domain experts, that aim to produce the best possible maps of the Sun's powerful magnetic field and have created some of the world's largest repositories of data about bird morphology.

About the Speaker

David Fouhey is an Associate Professor at New York University and a research scientist at Polymathic AI. Before joining NYU, he received a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, was a postdoc at UC Berkeley, and was a professor at University of Michigan.

Solaris: Building a Multiplayer Video World Model in Minecraft

This talk will introduce Solaris: a multiplayer video world model in Minecraft. I will first present SolarisEngine, the software platform we built to simulate realistic multiplayer gameplay between bots at scale, enabling us to collect a large training dataset of aligned multiplayer actions and frames.

I will then discuss our staged training pipeline, starting with single-player pre-training before converting the model into a long-horizon multiplayer generator through bidirectional training, followed by causal training, and concluding with Self Forcing. I will also cover our memory-efficient implementation of Self Forcing, called Checkpointed Self Forcing.

Finally, I will showcase generated videos illustrating how Solaris maintains coherent long-horizon multiplayer interactions.

About the Speaker

Oscar Michel is a PhD student at NYU advised by Prof. Saining Xie. His research studies world models: generative models of agents interacting in an environment.

Closing the human to robot gap for dexterous hands

Collecting task-specific robot data for multi-fingered hands is challenging due to the many difficulties that arise in teleoperation. That is why recently there has been a major focus on learning robot policies directly from human demonstrations. However, human demonstrations are difficult to work with; there is a major morphological and visual gap between human and robot hands, as well as between the environments they operate in.

In this talk, I'd like to discuss my efforts on closing this gap.

About the Speaker

Irmak Guzey I'm Irmak (she/her), a rising 3rd year PhD student at New York University, currently advised by Lerrel Pinto. My research focuses on robot learning for dexterous manipulation. I have been awarded a Fulbright scholarship and NYU's Best Master's Thesis Award in the past.