From Consensus to Cognition: Building Smarter Systems with Graphs and Agents

What do distributed systems and Agentic AI have in common? Both struggle to make sense of chaos — whether it’s servers trying to agree on a number or AI agents reasoning over vast, unstructured knowledge.

Join us for an evening where systems engineering meets intelligent reasoning.

The agenda of the evening would be:
* 5:30pm~6:20pm: Checkin and networking
* 6:30pm~8:00pm: Tech talks and Q&A
* 8:00pm: Open discussion & Mixer

Speakers:
🎤 Jim Webber, Chief Scientist, Neo4j
Talk Topic: The Pub-Time Parliament
Talk Description: A hilarious yet insightful journey into how computers (like a bunch of drunks in a pub) reach consensus. Learn how classic consensus algorithms keep distributed systems reliable — and explore new research that promises both correctness and scalability.
Speaker Bio: I am Neo4j’s Chief Scientist and Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, UK. At Neo4j I lead the research group, working on a variety of database topics including query languages and runtimes, temporality, streaming, scale, and fault-tolerance. I have also also co-authored several books on graph technology including Graph Databases - 1st and 2nd Editions (O’Reilly), Graph Databases for Dummies (Wiley), and Building Knowledge Graphs (O’Reilly).
Prior to Neo4j, I worked on fault-tolerant distributed systems. First at Newcastle University startup Arjuna and then for a variety of clients for global consulting firm ThoughtWorks. Along the way I co-authored the distrubuted systems books REST in Practice (O’Reilly) and Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect’s Guide (Prentice-Hall).
🎤 Tomaz Bratanic, GenAI Researcher, Neo4j
Talk Topic: Agentic GraphRAG
Talk Description: RAG works — until complex context kicks in. GraphRAG upgrades retrieval by weaving in knowledge graphs to structure information, boost relevance, and enable explainable, reasoning-driven generation. Discover how symbolic reasoning and neural search fuse to power next-gen agentic AI.
Speaker Bio: TOMAZ BRATANIC has extensive experience with graphs, machine learning, and generative AI. He has written an in-depth book about using graph algorithms and GraphRAG.

Expect an evening of laughs, learning, and lively discussion — because even the smartest systems need a good debate to reach consensus. 🍻