ML & AI Meetup at Zühle Engineering

Agenda

• 17:45 Open Door bei Zühlke in Bern
• 18:00 Welcome
• 18:05 Talk 1: Paola Bianchi: "Agentic AI in the Real World: Patterns, Pitfalls, and Production Readiness"
• 18:30 Talk 2: Nico Martin: Look ma, no hands! Multimodal AI-Agents in the browser
• 19:00 Apéro
• 19:45 Closing

There is only limited capacity - so first come, first serve. Please be fair - if you cannot make, cancel your reservation.

Location and Apéro is sponsored by Zühlke Engineering AG - thanks a lot for supporting the AI and ML community in Bern!

About Talk 1: "Agentic AI in the Real World: Patterns, Pitfalls, and Production Readiness" by Paola Bianchi

Abstract:
AI agents are one of the hottest topics right now. Frameworks and tools make it easier than ever to spin up quick demos and prototypes, but turning those into reliable, production-ready systems is another story.
In this talk, we’ll look at what it takes to move beyond demos and toy projects: from the challenges of designing agent workflows, to the limits of prompting and context management, to critical concerns about data, security, and evaluation.
Drawing on real project experience, we’ll explore practical patterns, cautionary tales, and strategies to help you build agentic AI applications that don’t just work in a demo, but hold up in the real world.
Speaker:
Paola Bianchi is a Lead Data Scientist at Zühlke Engineering AG and has several years of experience in machine learning projects. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Milan, where she conducted research in the area of formal languages and automata theory. Before joining Zühlke in 2016, she worked as a postdoc researcher on complexity theory at ETH Zürich.

About Talk 2: Look ma, no hands! Multimodal AI-Agents in the browser by Nico Martin

Abstract:
In this talk, we’ll explore how to build multimodal AI agents that understand voice, interpret images, hold short-term memory, and respond intelligently - all running entirely in the browser. No server, no cloud APIs, and no installation. Using modern tools like WebGPU and WebAssembly, we’ll see how far the open web has come in enabling real-time, privacy-preserving AI experiences.
Speaker:
Nico Martin is a Machine Learning Engineer with focus on WebML at Hugging Face and Google Developer Expert in AI and Web Technologies from Switzerland.
He specializes in making AI accessible through web browsers, developing tools that simplify ML integration for developers. Nico actively shares his expertise through workshops, articles, and conference presentations, bridging the gap between web development and machine learning communities.