Aberdeen Data Platform and Cloud User Group

Name: Data Platform and Cloud - November User Group Meeting
Start: 2026-11-18T18:00:00.000Z
End: 2026-11-18T20:00:00.000Z
Location: Ithaca Energy

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About us

We are a group of people who seek to share knowledge and experience about data and cloud technologies with those who want to learn. It is important to us that this is freely available so that anyone who wants the opportunity to learn new skills or wants to share their knowledge with the technology community in Aberdeen can do so.

Code of Conduct
To ensure that we provide a welcoming and inclusive space for all attendees we require all group members to abide by the Azure Data Tech Groups - Code of Conduct which is published by Microsoft.

Violations of this Code of Conduct will not be tolerated, and any violations should be reported to any of the organisers and will be treated in the strictest confidence.
Consequences may include:

Verbal or written warnings.
Expulsion from the event and banning from future events.
Expulsion from the group.
Law enforcement contact if appropriate.

Featured event

Data Platform and Cloud - November User Group Meeting

Wed, Nov 18 · 6:00 PM GMT

Ithaca Energy, Hill of Rubislaw, Aberdeen, GB

Hosted at: Ithaca Energy offices, Aberdeen

Event Sponsorship: Kubrick

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We’re excited to have you join us for an evening of learning, networking, and good company! Here’s what we have planned:
18:00 - Doors Open

Grab some pizza, meet fellow members, and get settled in!

18:35 - Welcome & Introductions

A quick hello to kick things off and set the tone for the evening.

18:40 - Lightning Talk (20 minutes)

Speaker : Geoff Jones
Topic: Your AI Agent Doesn’t Know What a Barrel Is
Every organisation is now building AI agents, and most of them fail in the same way. The agent can see tables and columns, but it has no idea what the business means by them. Ask it “what’s our revenue per active customer this quarter?” and it has to guess. Gross, net or recognised revenue? Is an active customer someone who logged in, or someone who paid? Does the fiscal year start in January or February? Which of the 47 revenue tables is the one Finance actually trusts? The agent picks something and gives you a confident answer that’s wrong. Then it does all that guessing again from scratch the next time someone asks.
This talk looks at that context problem and at one practical way to solve it: Databricks Genie Ontology. It’s an enterprise context layer that sits between your data and any agent. It combines two kinds of knowledge:
Modelled knowledge: governed KPI definitions, business glossaries and domains that people curate and certify.
Learned knowledge: definitions, rules and sources of truth picked up automatically from the queries, notebooks, dashboards and pipelines your teams already use.
A ranking algorithm called OntoRank then weighs that knowledge by authority and relevance and respects each user’s permissions. Any agent can use the context over MCP, so you’re not tied to one tool.
We’ll walk through how it works step by step, show worked examples, and look at evaluation results on real-world questions. You’ll leave with a clear picture of where human curation pays off, where automated learning does the work for you, and how to start building a context layer for your own data.

19:15 - Main Presentation (40 minutes)

Speaker: Steven Wallace
Topic: AI Agents: From Perception to Autonomous Action
Recent advances in foundation models have given rise to AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, and acting autonomously across complex tasks. This talk explores the shift from static, single-purpose deep learning models towards agentic systems that combine perception, multi-modal understanding, and decision-making to operate independently in real-world environments. Drawing on examples from natural language processing and beyond, we examine the opportunities of building AI agents that are capable of carrying out complex multi-step tasks.

19:55 - Closing Remarks & Thank You