Where Human Expertise Meets Structured Automation

Join us for an Apache Kafka® meetup on Wednesday, January 22nd from 6:00pm in Lisbon hosted by Marionete!

📍Venue:
Marionete
Praça Duque de Saldanha, Atrium, 9D

You can come into the offices through one of the two side streets:
Av. Casal Ribeiro 63, Atrium, Lisboa, Portugal
Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo , Atrium, Lisboa, Portugal

If you cannot attend, please change your RSVP so someone else can join! Thank you!

🗓️ Agenda:

• 6:00pm: Doors open
• 6:00pm - 6:30pm: Food, Drinks & Networking
• 6:30pm - 7:15pm: Eduardo Ramos and Lucy Woods, Marionete
• 7:15pm - 8:00pm - Additional Q&A & Networking

💡Speakers:
Eduardo Ramos, Junior Software Engineer, Marionete
Lucy Woods, Junior Software Engineer, Marionet

Title of Talk:
Where Human Expertise Meets Structured Automation

Abstract:
Organizations increasingly rely on expert judgment to process large volumes of complex, high-risk data for tasks such as phishing investigations and fraud reviews. These workflows are often slow, inconsistent, and costly due to their sequential, manual nature and reliance on specialist availability.

We present an alternative approach that uses an event-driven system to break complex expert analysis into smaller, AI-assisted steps executed in a clear, structured sequence. This allows routine parts of the process to be automated while ensuring that human experts remain in control of the final review and decision-making. A proof of concept developed to meet client specifications demonstrates how state-machine orchestration improves consistency, reduces processing time, and standardizes outputs without removing human oversight.

We also discuss the practical challenges encountered during the proof of concept, along with the architectural and operational solutions adopted. Finally, we show how the same human-in-the-loop, state-driven architecture can be adapted to other resilience-critical domains such as cancer screening, financial market analysis, and job-posting fraud detection

Bios:
Eduardo Ramos is a Junior Software Engineer with a Master’s degree in Informatics and Computer Engineering from FEUP (Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto). His work focuses on AI-driven systems, cybersecurity, and distributed architectures, with hands-on experience in automating expert workflows, phishing detection, and secure software design. Eduardo has worked across research and applied engineering roles, and has contributed to multiple AI projects, including LLM-assisted security workflows and AI models for automated content translation, summarization, and domain-specific prediction tasks.

Lucy Woods is a Junior Software Engineer at Marionete, specialising in test based coding approaches. She modernised a critical 50 year old test suite before moving to begin her career as a software developer. In her day-to-day work, she works with Kafka/Confluent and Spring Boot.

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DISCLAIMER
NOTE: We are unable to cater for any attendees under the age of 18.
If you would like to speak or host our next event please let us know! community@confluent.io