Singapore AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision Meetup

* Oct 28, 2025
* 9:00-10:30 AM Pacific
* Online. Register for the Zoom!

Want greater visibility into the quality of your computer vision datasets and models? Then join us for this free 90-minute, hands-on workshop to learn how to leverage the open source FiftyOne computer vision toolset.
At the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Load and visualize agricultural datasets with complex labels
• Explore data insights interactively using embeddings and statistics
• Work with geolocation and map-based visualizations
• Generate high-quality annotations with the Segment Anything Model (SAM2)
• Evaluate model performance and debug predictions using real AgTec scenarios

Prerequisites: working knowledge of Python and basic computer vision concepts.

Resources: All attendees will get access to the tutorials, videos, and code examples used in the workshop.

Learn how to:

• Visualize complex datasets
• Explore embeddings
• Analyze and improve models
• Perform advanced data curation
• Build integrations with popular ML tools, models, and datasets

Oct 30, 2025
9 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom!

The Agent Factory: Building a Platform for Enterprise-Wide AI Automation

In this talk we will explore what it takes to build an enterprise-ready AI automation platform at scale. The topics covered will include:

• The Scale Challenge: E-commerce environments expose the limitations of single-point AI solutions, which create fragmented ecosystems lacking cohesion and efficient resource sharing across complex, knowledge-based work.
• Root Cause Analysis Success: Flipkart’s initial AI agent transformed business analysis from days-long investigations to near-instantaneous insights, proving the concept while revealing broader platform opportunities.
• Platform Strategy Evolution: Success across Engineering (SDLC, SRE), Operations, and Commerce teams necessitated a unified, multi-tenant platform serving diverse use cases with consistency and operational efficiency.
• Architectural Foundation: Leveraging framework-agnostic design principles we were able to emphasize modularity, which enabled teams to leverage different AI models while maintaining consistent interfaces and scalable infrastructure.
• The “Agent Garden” Vision: Flipkart’s roadmap envisions an internal ecosystem where teams discover, deploy, and contribute AI agents, providing a practical blueprint for scalable AI agent infrastructure development.

About the Speaker

Virender Bhargav at Flipkart is a seasoned engineering leader whose expertise spans business technology integration, enterprise applications, system design/architecture, and building highly scalable systems. With a deep understanding of technology, he has spearheaded teams, modernized technology landscapes, and managed core platform layers and strategic products. With extensive experience driving innovation at companies like Paytm and Flipkart, his contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry.

Scaling Generative Models at Scale with Ray and PyTorch

Generative image models like Stable Diffusion have opened up exciting possibilities for personalization, creativity, and scalable deployment. However, fine-tuning them in production‐grade settings poses challenges: managing compute, hyperparameters, model size, data, and distributed coordination are nontrivial.

In this talk, we’ll dive deep into learning how to fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using Ray Train (with HuggingFace Diffusers), including approaches like DreamBooth and LoRA. We’ll cover what works (and what doesn’t) in scaling out training jobs, handling large data, optimizing for GPU memory and speed, and validating outputs. Attendees will come away with practical insights and patterns they can use to fine-tune generative models in their own work.

About the Speaker

Suman Debnath is a Technical Lead (ML) at Anyscale, where he focuses on distributed training, fine-tuning, and inference optimization at scale on the cloud. His work centers around building and optimizing end-to-end machine learning workflows powered by distributed computing framework like Ray, enabling scalable and efficient ML systems.
Suman’s expertise spans Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Earlier in his career, he developed performance benchmarking and monitoring tools for distributed storage systems. Beyond engineering, Suman is an active community contributor, having spoken at over 100 global conferences and events, including PyCon, PyData, ODSC, AIE and numerous meetups worldwide.

Privacy-preserving in Computer Vision through Optics Learning

Cameras are now ubiquitous, powering computer vision systems that assist us in everyday tasks and critical settings such as operating rooms. Yet, their widespread use raises serious privacy concerns: traditional cameras are designed to capture high-resolution images, making it easy to identify sensitive attributes such as faces, nudity, or personal objects. Once acquired, such data can be misused if accessed by adversaries. Existing software-based privacy mechanisms, such as blurring or pixelation, often degrade task performance and leave vulnerabilities in the processing pipeline.

In this talk, we explore an alternative question: how can we preserve privacy before or during image acquisition? By revisiting the image formation model, we show how camera optics themselves can be learned and optimized to acquire images that are unintelligible to humans yet remain useful for downstream vision tasks like action recognition. We will discuss recent approaches to learning camera lenses that intentionally produce privacy-preserving images, blurry and unrecognizable to the human eye, but still effective for machine perception. This paradigm shift opens the door to a new generation of cameras that embed privacy directly into their hardware design.

About the Speaker

Carlos Hinojosa is a Postdoctoral researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) working with Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research interests span Computer Vision, Machine Learning, AI Safety, and AI for Science. He focuses on developing safe, accurate, and efficient vision systems and machine-learning models that can reliably perceive, understand, and act on information, while ensuring robustness, protecting privacy, and aligning with societal values.

It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

Can we match vision and language embeddings without any supervision? According to the platonic representation hypothesis, as model and dataset scales increase, distances between corresponding representations are becoming similar in both embedding spaces. Our study demonstrates that pairwise distances are often sufficient to enable unsupervised matching, allowing vision-language correspondences to be discovered without any parallel data.

About the Speaker

Dominik Schnaus is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), supervised by Daniel Cremers. His research centers on multimodal and self-supervised learning with a special emphasis on understanding similarities across embedding spaces of different modalities.

Nov 6, 2025
9-11 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom!

Document AI: A Review of the Latest Models, Tasks and Tools

In this talk, go through everything document AI: trends, models, tasks, tools! By the end of this talk you will be able to get to building apps based on document models

About the Speaker

Merve Noyan works on multimodal AI and computer vision at Hugging Face, and she's the author of the book Vision Language Models on O'Reilly.

Run Document VLMs in Voxel51 with the VLM Run Plugin — PDF to JSON in Seconds

The new VLM Run Plugin for Voxel51 enables seamless execution of document vision-language models directly within the Voxel51 environment. This integration transforms complex document workflows — from PDFs and scanned forms to reports — into structured JSON outputs in seconds. By treating documents as images, our approach remains general, scalable, and compatible with any visual model architecture. The plugin connects visual data curation with model inference, empowering teams to run, visualize, and evaluate document understanding models effortlessly. Document AI is now faster, reproducible, and natively integrated into your Voxel51 workflows.

About the Speaker

Dinesh Reddy is a founding team member of VLM Run, where he is helping nurture the platform from a sapling into a robust ecosystem for running and evaluating vision-language models across modalities. Previously, he was a scientist at Amazon AWS AI, working on large-scale machine learning systems for intelligent document understanding and visual AI. He completed his Ph.D. at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on combining learning-based methods with 3D computer vision for in-the-wild data. His research has been recognized with the Best Paper Award at IEEE IVS 2021 and fellowships from Amazon Go and Qualcomm.

CommonForms: Automatically Making PDFs Fillable

Converting static PDFs into fillable forms remains a surprisingly difficult task, even with the best commercial tools available today. We show that with careful dataset curation and model tuning, it is possible to train high-quality form field detectors for under $500. As part of this effort, we introduce CommonForms, a large-scale dataset of nearly half a million curated form images. We also release a family of highly accurate form field detectors, FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L.

About the Speaker

Joe Barrow is a researcher at Pattern Data, specializing in document AI and information extraction. He previously worked at the Adobe Document Intelligence Lab after receiving his PhD from the University of Maryland in 2022.

Visual Document Retrieval: How to Cluster, Search and Uncover Biases in Document Image Datasets Using Embeddings

In this talk you'll learn about the task of visual document retrieval, the models which are widely used by the community, and see them in action through the open source FiftyOne App where you'll learn how to use these models to identify groups and clusters of documents, find unique documents, uncover biases in your visual document dataset, and search over your document corpus using natural language.

About the Speaker

Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He’s got a deep interest in VLMs, Visual Agents, Document AI, and Physical AI.

This hands-on workshop introduces you to document visual AI workflows using FiftyOne, the leading open-source toolkit for computer vision datasets.

Date and Location

Nov 14, 2025
9:00-10:30 AM Pacific
Online. Register for the Zoom

In document understanding, a pixel is worth a thousand tokens. While traditional text-extraction pipelines tokenize and process documents sequentially, modern visual AI approaches can understand document structure, layout, and content directly from images—making them more efficient, accurate, and robust to diverse document formats.

In this workshop you'll learn how to:

• Load and organize document datasets in FiftyOne for visual exploration and analysis
• Compute visual embeddings using state-of-the-art document retrieval models to enable semantic search and similarity analysis
• Leverage FiftyOne workflows including similarity search, clustering, and quality assessment to gain insights from your document collections
• Deploy modern vision-language models for OCR and document understanding tasks that go beyond simple text extraction
• Evaluate and compare different OCR models to select the best approach for your specific use case

Whether you're working with invoices, receipts, forms, scientific papers, or mixed document types, this workshop will equip you with practical skills to build robust document AI pipelines that harness the power of visual understanding. Walk away with reproducible notebooks and best practices for tackling real-world document intelligence challenges.