Data Science Philadelphia (DataPhilly)

📢 Join us at UPenn for an inspiring DataPhilly evening on visibility, trust, and intelligent systems.
✨ In special collaboration with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania — with gratitude to our sponsor for providing space and refreshments.
Abhijnan Prakash, Founder and CEO of 3 wired minds:
GEO: Understanding Visibility in the Age of AI Search
We’re moving from searching to asking, and AI is answering. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) looks at how this shift changes visibility and what it takes to be understood by intelligent systems.
Abstract: Online discovery is changing. People increasingly turn to generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to find information and recommendations. These models don’t simply retrieve links, they interpret meaning and generate context. In this environment, visibility depends less on traditional search ranking and more on how accurately a brand is represented and understood by intelligent systems. GEO is about shaping that understanding. It focuses on building a consistent, credible digital presence that AI models and humans can both interpret with confidence. GEO identifies inconsistencies across platforms, evaluates a brand’s perceived authority, and analyzes sentiment to understand how it’s described and trusted. By ensuring clarity, coherence, and contextual relevance, GEO helps brands become discoverable within the generative web by making meaning machine readable. It’s the evolution of visibility in an age where discovery is powered by understanding, not just search.
Bio: I’m Abhijnan Prakash, founder and CEO of 3 Wired Minds, where I explore how AI is changing the way people and ideas are discovered online. Before starting 3 Wired Minds, I worked as a Researcher and growth hacker, helping them identify opportunities for digital acceleration, visibility, and strategic scaling. Those experiences deepened my interest in how technology shapes communication and decision making.
In recent years, I’ve been working on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), studying how AI search systems interpret meaning, context, and trust. I’m particularly interested in how this shift influences how individuals, brands, and ideas are represented in the digital world, and how we can make those representations clearer and more human.
At 3 Wired Minds, I build strategies that connect engineering, design, and language. Helping people and organizations communicate with purpose in an age defined by intelligent discovery.

Ciro Greco, Jacopo Tagliabue, and Tim Frazer:
Safe, Untrusted, Proof-Carrying AI Agents towards the agentic lakehouse
Abstract: Lakehouses are the backbone of data and AI workloads, but their complexity makes automation challenging: how can agents reason about cloud infrastructure, data-specific abstractions, and business logic while maintaining production stability? We argue that the answer is not larger or newer models, but better infrastructure.
In this talk, we present a design for the "agentic lakehouse," starting from first principles: Git-for-Data (versioning, branching, reproducibility) and FaaS execution (isolation, fast scheduling) at the infrastructure level enable trustworthy code execution at the application level. We introduce the "self-repairing pipeline" as a kind of Turing Test for lakehouse automation: a task that is tedious for humans but critical for organizations, and a litmus test for whether agents can operate reliably in open-ended environments. Using Bauplan as a reference implementation, we share lessons learned from tackling this challenge both in silico and in the wild, and conclude by outlining our vision for infrastructure that is simultaneously human-centric, enterprise-safe, and agent-ready.

Bio: Ciro Greco - co-founder and CEO at Bauplan, a serverless computing platform for complex data workloads. Developers can write complex, multi-language data pipelines with zero environment management and infrastructure configuration and the same instantaneous feedback loop as running code locally. Formerly, he was the founder of Tooso, an NLP startup based in San Francisco. Tooso was acquired by Coveo in 2019 and Ciro was in the management team that brought Coveo to IPO in 2021. In a previous life he got a PhD in Neuroscience at Milan-Bicocca, a postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University and he was visiting scientist at MIT.

Jacopo Tagliabue is the co-founder of Bauplan, a data and AI infrastructure company based in SF and NYC. Previously, he co-founded Tooso (acquired by TSX:CVO), led Coveo's AI through IPO and launched Coveo Labs, producing open-source libraries, models, and datasets widely adopted by industry and academia. His research spans AI, information retrieval, data management, and computer systems, with collaborations at Netflix, NVIDIA, Stanford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. While building his new startup, he moonlights as Professor of ML Systems at NYU, which is only notable because it is the only job he ever had that his parents understand.

Tim Frazer is Director of Data Engineering at Trust & Will, leading the development of EstateOS™ data platform an intelligent estate planning platform. A self-taught engineer, he builds business-aligned data systems. Previously, he led data at Thrive Global and was a senior engineer at Bonobos/Walmart.

🍕Refreshments will be provided. Parking and public transit details will be shared soon.
Please note, by RSVPing this event you agree to our Code of Conduct.

Join us as DataPhilly partners with Philly Data & AI for a joint end-of-year Holiday Happy Hour! We’re wrapping up 2025 with good food, festive vibes, and plenty of time to relax and connect with fellow data, AI, and tech folks across the city.

No presentations and no agenda — just a casual, welcoming evening to meet new people, catch up with familiar faces, and celebrate the year together.

Drinks are pay-as-you-go, and we’ll have extra holiday bites and seasonal fun to keep things cheerful all night.

✨ Dress code: Everyone is encouraged to wear their best Christmas look — whether it’s your favorite ugly sweater, reindeer antlers, or anything festive!

Come for the community, stay for the holiday spirit. Let’s celebrate the Philly data scene together!
Please note that by RSVPing you accept our Code of Conduct