The Austin Python Meetup Monthly Meetup

This is a Hybrid event both in-person and virtual. The in-person event is hosted at Antler downtown Austin.

Address:
522 Congress Avenue Suite 400, Austin
The entrance is off of 6th street between the Velvet Taco and Ruth's Chris, the same building where we used to attend the meetup at BlackLocus.

Talk 1 (virtual): Dr. Chong Shen Ng - Federated Learning Made Simple: A Beginner’s Guide with Flower

Talk 2 (in-person): Khalid Muaydh - What’s up with MCP (Model Context Protocol) ?

Talk 1 description: AI projects often face the challenge of limited access to meaningful amounts of training data. In traditional approaches, collecting data in a central location can be problematic, especially in industry settings with sensitive and distributed data. However, there is a solution – “moving the computation to the data” through Federated Learning.

Federated learning, a distributed machine learning approach, offers a promising solution by enabling model training across devices. It is a data minimization approach where direct access to data is not required. Furthermore, federated learning can be combined with techniques like differential privacy, secure aggregation, homomorphic encryption, and others, to further enhance privacy protection. In this talk, we delve into the realm of privacy-preserving distributed machine learning using federated learning, leveraging the open-source Flower framework which is specifically designed to simplify the process of building federated learning systems.

We start by presenting the basic concepts of federated learning. Then, we will walk through several practical code examples that showcase how you can federate any AI project with the Flower framework.

The Flower framework and examples are available at these links:

• https://github.com/adap/flower
• https://flower.ai/docs/examples/

To learn more about Flower, visit us at https://flower.ai. You can also join the open-source Flower community on Slack to connect, ask questions, and get help: Join Slack. We’d love to hear from you in the #introductions channel! And if anything is unclear, head over to the #questions channel.

Bio: Dr. Chong Shen Ng is a Research Engineer at Flower Labs with over a decade of experience in both research and industry, specializing in federated learning, data science, and parallel computing. As a key developer, he focuses on scaling Flower to deploy privacy-enhanced distributed AI solutions for real-world applications. Chong Shen is passionate about contributing to the open-source community, developing trustworthy AI systems through federated learning, and advancing edge AI technologies. A dedicated advocate for open-source software, he has co-chaired PyData Global events and volunteered at SciPy and PyData London conferences.

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Talk 2 Description:

Fastn.ai’s CEO will talk about MCP, The risk and how to mitigate. He will also talk about Unified Command Layer of Fastn and share a working demo.

SPONSORS
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Antler
Antler works with founders through our signature founder residency, adding value immediately, and taking no equity up front. We receive over 160,000 applications each year to build companies with us, and have grown to 18 funds with residencies in 30 cities around the globe. Founders also have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee to receive an up to $500K investment, allowing them to build for 12-18 months rather than attempting to raise before they have real traction.