TAICO Toronto Tech Week 2025 meetup!

We are officially part of Toronto Tech Week 2025, a weeklong citywide collection of events to connect and celebrate the builders. June 23 → June 27, 2025.

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**** YOU MUST REGISTER ON THE LUMA PAGE! ****
**** THIS EVENT IS PART OF TORONTO TECH WEEK ****
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The TAICO team is proud to announce our next meetup at the Adaptavist office in Toronto. Much thanks to Adaptavist for hosting!

Attention!

• Please be careful when using maps features on phones, some people have been redirected to a completely wrong address. The event is near Winners on Front St, which is just south, across the street, from Berczy Park (where the dog fountain is) so if you are not near that area, you are in the wrong place.

Registration and Event Details

YOU MUST REGISTER ON LUMA FOR THIS EVENT: https://lu.ma/cemkfon9

Our goal is to bring artificial intelligence and cybersecurity together. To do that, we need to explore what's happening in AI and what's happening in cybersecurity, and where the two intersect and collide. We're also working to understand how we solve problems in these areas, what that looks like, and how Canada can and will participate.

With that in mind, we're pleased to announce our speaker and the agenda for our next meeting!

Agenda

• 👋 Welcome and introductions
• 🙏 Thank you to our amazing hosts and sponsors! 🎉
• 🎙️ Speakers

🎤 Speaker #1: Amir Kiani
Title: Do Reasoning Models Really Reason?

Abstract:

In this talk, we’ll survey recent research at the intersection of AI and Philosophy to critically assess whether large language models that appear to reason are genuinely engaging in reasoning or merely simulating it. We’ll examine some key philosophical and technical arguments and explore what this means for our understanding of intelligence, agency, and the nature of thought itself.

About Amir Kiani:

Amir Kiani holds a PhD in Philosophy, with a focus on mathematical philosophy and logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of AI. During the day, he works as a senior analyst at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), where he applies analytics and machine learning to large-scale healthcare data. By night, he researches the philosophical foundations and implications of AI—or attends to his cats, depending on which is more demanding.

Amir has delivered several talks on the crossovers of AI and Philosophy, including recent presentations on whether large language models possess minds (at Microsoft’s Vancouver headquarters and the Mindstone AI community in Toronto), and on AI and corporate transparency (at the AI and Humanities Lab at the University of Toronto).

🎤 Speaker #2: Kosseila HD

Title:

local LLM inference on Cloud managed Kubernetes your path to 100% privacy

Abstract:

In a world accustomed to AI assistants using pricey proprietary models from companies like OpenAI, what if your users require full control over the personal information exchanged with AI models? is there a way ? The answer is yes! Join us to explore how to build a web-based private chatbot powered by Local LLM inference straight out of ollama pods, ensuring 100% data privacy for containerized workloads in Kubernetes clusters powering your favorite chatbot and IDE.

⚡ Lightning Talks and Demos

Lightning Talks - 5 to 10 minutes long

1. Curtis Collicutt - Demo of Raillock - Raillock is an open source project that “locks” MCP server tool descriptions with cryptographic signatures. It can be used as a CLI or a Python library and can be imported into AI Agents that are MCP clients and help them protect themselves from malicious MCP servers and other MCP vulnerabilities.
2. You? - Please reach out if you'd like to do a lightning talk or demo

Please reach out to us if you'd like to present at the meetup. We are looking for people to talk about what they are working on, what they are building and learning, and are open to any level of experience and technical depth. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, we want to hear from you! We're all just out here building and learning.

👋 See You There!

Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you at the meetup!