ChicagoRuby @ workforce.com

Speakers:
🎤 Kevin Murphy (remote) - InstiLLMent of Successful Practices in an Agentic World
Congrats on joining Hours Unlimited. The Math and Numbers team is excited to have you join us on our journey to redefine the importance of numerals. This introductory session will provide tips and tricks for best interacting with powerfuLLMachine, the next-level platform we use to unlock productivity and effectiveness.

About Kevin:
Kevin lives near Boston, where he is a Software Developer at Pubmark. He spent way too much time trying to come up with a quirky fact to add to his bio, and came up empty.

🎤 Dan Phillips (in person) - No Better Sandbox: Ruby, Wasm, and the Future of AI Agent Runtimes.
As AI agents gain the ability to execute code, access tools, and interact with external systems, the runtime they operate in becomes a primary security boundary. This talk argues that WebAssembly represents the strongest sandbox available today for agent execution and explores what that actually means in practice.

We’ll examine the specific classes of exploits that simply are not possible in a Wasm-based agent runtime: arbitrary memory reads and writes, syscall abuse, privilege escalation, kernel escapes, shared-library attacks, ambient filesystem access, and uncontrolled process spawning. By constraining execution to explicit module sets, capability-scoped imports and exports, a virtual filesystem, and WebAssembly’s strict Harvard architecture, entire categories of historical sandbox failures are structurally eliminated rather than mitigated.
Using Boxer as a concrete implementation, we’ll show how these constraints translate into a practical, production-grade agent runtime, specifically one that is deterministic, inspectable, and hostile by default. We’ll also highlight a key but often overlooked advantage: universality. Unlike agent sandboxes tied to specific clouds or server environments, a Wasm-based runtime can execute the same agent logic in browsers, servers, bare metal, and embedded systems without changing the trust model.
Finally, we’ll discuss why this model is not just well-suited for MCP tooling, but represents a general-purpose foundation for the next generation of AI agent runtimes, where safety is enforced by construction, not policy.

About Dan:
Dan Phillips is a Senior Engineer at Loophole Labs, where one of his main areas of focus is WebAssembly on the server. He is also the founder and organizer of the WebAssembly Chicago group.

Location:
Workforce.com @ 222 W Hubbard St Unit 310 · Chicago, IL
UNIT 310

Location Details:

• Walk-ins allowed
• Register/RSVP with your First + Last name
• Snacks and light refreshments will be served BUT NOT DINNER. Please plan your meals accordingly.
• To navigate to the office, attendees will need to use the dial pad at the main entryway of the building to dial up the workforce office. Workforce employees will let all attendees up into the office.

For remote attendance:
Join us via the following Zoom URL.

We want to hear from you!
Interested in speaking but unsure what to talk about? Interested in hearing a specific topic? We have compiled a list of potential topic ideas that members of the community are interested in learning more about.
See: this google spreadsheet for potential talk topic ideas.
For moderation purposes, this spreadsheet is only available for comments and admins will add ideas from comments onto the list.
Reach out to Michelle (michelle@zooniverse.org) if you have any questions.