The Austin Python Meetup

New location at Brazos Place @ 800 Brazos st. us the entrance on brazos street not 8th.
This is a Hybrid event both in-person and virtual. The in-person event is hosted at Antler downtown Austin.

Address:
Brazos Place @ 800 Brazos st,
The entrance is off of Brazos st.

Talk Title: Ivelin Ivanov - Decentralized Robotics AI: Building Helpful Robots with zk0 and Federated Learning

Description:
Imagine teaching robots to help around the house—like picking up toys or sorting laundry—without ever sharing your private home videos with a central server. This is the promise of zk0, a new open-source platform that enables robots to learn skills together safely and privately using federated learning.
In this talk, Ivelin will introduce us to zk0, a framework designed to train advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on real-world robotics datasets. We will explore how zk0 leverages Flower for privacy-preserving federated learning and SmolVLA to run efficient 450M parameter models optimized for consumer GPUs. Ivelin will discuss the architecture behind decentralized robotics, how it handles SO-100 manipulation tasks, and the future of community-driven robot learning powered by ZK proofs and blockchain incentives.

About the Speaker: Ivelin Ivanov is an open-source contributor and technology entrepreneur with previous startup exits to Red Hat and IBM. He is currently helping startups in the Founder Institute program and building the next generation of decentralized AI for robotics.

Antler
Antler works with founders through our signature founder residency, adding value immediately, and taking no equity up front. We receive over 160,000 applications each year to build companies with us, and have grown to 18 funds with residencies in 30 cities around the globe. Founders also have the opportunity to pitch our Investment Committee to receive an up to $500K investment, allowing them to build for 12-18 months rather than attempting to raise before they have real traction.