IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

The MLAI Meetup is a community for AI researchers and professionals which hosts monthly talks on exciting research. Our format is: * 6:00 - 6:20: Socializing * 6:20 - 6:40: Announcements and AI news * 6:40 - 7:40: Talk(s) and Q&A * 7:40 - 8:00 Networking * 8:00: Head to the nearest pub for dinner **THREE amazing talks tonight:** 1. **Chaehan So: “Deep Listening AI: A Psychologist's Blueprint for Building a Virtual Friend”** 2. **Dushan Karovich-Wynne: “aigogo: Packaging AI Agents for Production”** 3. **Adam "Spidey" Purdie & Rohan Nowell: "Meet ABI AI in the real world"** Talk descriptions and speaker bios: **Adam "Spidey" Purdie & Rohan Nowell: "Meet ABI AI in the real world"** **Synopsis:** Andromeda's purpose is to build technology that strengthens connections and preserves purpose in people’s lives. This purpose shapes what we build and how we build it. The soul of the product matters as much as its capabilities, and our values are encoded through everyday decisions. Abi is our friendly humanoid robot who is built for this purpose. Where she most strongly differs from a LLM chatbot is in embodiment, she shares a physical environment with you. This comes with a whole new range of challenges, she doesn’t just need to know what to say to hold a conversation, she now also needs to control her body language through gestures. Spidey and Rohan will go through the purpose of Andromeda, how Abi is driving this and how we incorporate machine learning into her physical communication. **Speaker Bios:** **Adam Purdie Spidey**, Mad Scientist / Engineering Manager. Spidey regular meetup goer is best known for his ambitions to take over the world with an army of robotic spiders - furiously developing the spiders and other cuddly horrors by night, by day Spidey is an Engineering Manager in charge of customer applications and platform automation (SRE/Dev/Sec/Ops) and physical robotics. My team do awesome things and I give them all the direction, certainty and space to do it. **Rohan Nowell** is a Machine Learning Engineer at Andromeda Robotics with over 10 years of experience in robotic and autonomous systems. His broad expertise spans control systems, mechanical engineering, physics modelling, and autonomy, including work on uncrewed defence vehicles and miniature robots from his PhD at Monash University. He is currently focused on the complex challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, specifically optimizing for 'delightfulness' in embodied AI systems. **Dushan Karovich-Wynne: “aigogo: Packaging AI Agents for Production”** **Synopsis:** aigogo ( https://github.com/aupeachmo/aigogo )is an open-source project exploring what it actually takes to package, ship, and run AI agents in real production environments. In this talk, I’ll walk through how to use aigogo to package and distribute a real agent that does useful work. This talk isn’t about a finished framework, but an open exploration of what it takes to package and run AI agents in real production environments. Using aigogo as a concrete example, we’ll look at the practical tradeoffs that show up once AI systems move beyond experimentation and start behaving like deployable services. The session is designed to be collaborative and discussion-driven, drawing on the experiences of engineers and data scientists in the room. The goal is to surface what matters most in practice and to help shape the roadmap for aigogo and similar open-source efforts going forward. **Speaker Bio:** Dushan is the founder of Subrosa AI (www.subrosa.ai), he is building at the intersection of AI, risk mitigation, and governance, with a focus on making AI systems secure, auditable, and trustworthy in production environments. On top of his companies products which address data leakage and governance challenges as well as production-level AI agents, Dushan builds and maintains open-source projects that help people instrument, understand, sandbox and distribute AI agents. Outside of work, he's a lifelong dog lover who has been known to pull over to talk to dogs. **Chaehan So: “Deep Listening AI: A Psychologist's Blueprint for Building a Virtual Friend”** **Abstract:** What if AI could truly listen—not just respond with generic empathy, but recognize when you're avoiding a difficult topic, stuck in a thinking loop, or seeking validation you won't accept? In this talk, psychological-researcher-turned-AI-startup-founder Chaehan So shares what building Virtual Friend revealed about creating AI for deep emotional conversations. You'll discover why common approaches like fine-tuning and RAG fail for psychological applications—and what actually works. Key takeaways: * Why "respond with empathy" prompts don't work (and what to do instead) * How to engineer psychological awareness into AI conversations * The hidden patterns that unfold across a conversation—revealing what someone can't say directly Whether you're building AI products, interested in mental health tech, or curious about the intersection of psychology and AI, you'll leave with practical insights applicable far beyond chatbots. **Speaker Bio:** Dr. Chaehan So bridges psychology and AI to create technology that genuinely understands people. As founder of Virtual Friend, he's building an AI companion specifically designed to support young adults navigating anxiety, loneliness, and life transitions—combining clinical listening techniques with cutting-edge language models. With a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Dr. So brings psychological research methodology to AI development. His interdisciplinary background spans social psychology (Humboldt University Berlin), engineering (TU Berlin), and management (ESCP France), with previous experience as Assistant Professor of Information & Interaction Design at Yonsei University, South Korea. His mission: making AI that doesn't just talk to you, but truly listens.

**Meetups for Rebels of all kinds — to connect, learn and share** This is a Social Networking event with a Fireside Chat with [Phil Cummins](https://www.linkedin.com/in/professor-phil-cummins-50531185/), the Founder of a School for tomorrow, The Game Changers Podcast, & CIRCLE 📍 This Event is hosted at Natural Velocity AI Learning Centre, Docklands, 🍕 Free Pizza & drinks will be provided **Agenda:** * 5:45 - 6:30 PM (45 mins) - Get to know each other & Welcome * 6:30 - 7:20 PM (50 mins) - Fireside Chat & Q&A from Audience * 7:20 - 8:15 PM (55 mins) - More Social Networking There’s no dress code, no hard sales pitches, and no pressure — just great people and meaningful conversations 🙂 🌍 Est. 2013 – Rebel Meetups now run globally 🆓 This event is free thanks to our members, our partners, our volunteer hosts, and generous venues. **This event is hosted at [Natural Velocity AI Learning Centre](https://www.linkedin.com/company/natural-velocity/ "https://www.linkedin.com/company/natural-velocity/")** **— a venue generously supporting our community** Notice: We will be capturing content from the event, to post on our socials. **Please only RSVP if you genuinely plan to attend.** We have limited capacity, and every seat matters. If your plans change, kindly update your RSVP in advance. See you there! **Directions Help:** Up the Escalator, between 'Melbourne College of Hair & Beauty' and 'Gap Maps'. As shown in the red dots in the image below: [Directions Map](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fkcpXvzZrEs0kKMPEI_vXbUCz7OEPTzf/view?usp=sharing)

**Estrela do Mar** Inc is a Not-for-Profit organisation and this is a ticketed event, however don't let the investment be in your way, **please reach out** if you are experiencing financial difficulties to learn how can you contribute. Find out more at **[our](maracatu.org.au)** website. Workshops are held every Tuesday night at the Multicultural Hub in Melbourne, opposite the Vic Market. As the front door is locked after hours, please walk to Victoria Street, and turn right. You will find the door to Maracatu workshops on the right hand side just after Yarn Strong Sista. We teach **rhythm, song & movement** at regular workshops. Our style is traced through the lineage of groups (or "nations") such as **Maracatu Aurora Africana, Maracatu** **Estrela Brilhante**, **Maracatu** **Leão Coroado**, and others. We share a **living tradition of maracatu locally** to promote **social inclusion, break cultural barriers, and facilitate community building** & **engagement**. * **No musical experience** is required * **All instruments provided** * Not suitable for **children** Come along to learn & play this exhilarating rhythm. Please arrive at 6.25pm. The workshop will start at 6.30pm. \*\*Tickets: [https://events.humanitix.com/maracatu**](https://events.humanitix.com/maracatu**) $30 workshop or $20 concession Packages and Membership available

Visitors and newcomers are very welcome, please see https://hackmelbourne.com/newcomer-faq/ for more details. COVIDSafe restrictions are also in place, please see https://hackmelbourne.com/covid-19-restrictions/ for the latest. Short walk from Glenferrie train station. Car parking at Hawthorn town hall. Bring a laptop and a project you are working on. There is also a number of group projects that you are welcome to join in. We have starter kits for Arduino, a couple of 3D printers, various tools and equipment available for use. Typically our sessions run from 6:45pm till later in the evening (depending on our members' availability to close) but if you're new please come early.

Enjoy fabulous food at this local fav.

**AJ Bajada & Danidu Weerasinghe - What's new in Azure and GitHub** A fast, practical tour of the newest innovations across Azure and GitHub. We’ll break down the latest cloud capabilities, AI‑powered developer tools, security enhancements, and DevOps integrations that are transforming how teams build and ship software. **Dylan McCarthy - Managed DevOps Pools - Simplifying Build Agents for Azure DevOps** Managing build agents for Azure DevOps has always been a bit of a pain, requiring teams to create VMs or VM Scale Sets, maintain their images, manage spinning up and down resources to manage cost and build times. In this talk I want to show you how you can abstract away a lot of that pain by using Managed DevOps Pools. I will walk you through what the service is, it's features and then show you how to connect a pool to an Azure DevOps environment.

Starting the year with exciting topic: * **Topic:** Event Streaming with GCP DataFlow * **Date:** Thursday 19th February 2026 at 6.00 pm - 8.00 pm * **Networking:** 6 pm - 6.30 pm and 7.20 - 8 pm * **Presentation Time**: 6.30 pm - 7.20 pm *(includes welcome, presentation 30 mins & community marketplace)* * **Location:** Fabric Group, Level 9, 446 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000 * **Ticket:** Free of cost, however, registrations and RSVP are required! * **Sponsor:** Fabric Group, Thoughtworks **Event Streaming with GCP DataFlow** Learn about real time event streaming using GCP stack! This scalable event consolidation service orchestrates the real-time processing of millions of distributed data points into unified events. Built on GCP Dataflow and Pub/Sub, the architecture ensures high-throughput stream processing and seamless data synthesis for complex, distributed environments. ### **About The Speaker** *Abhishek is a Lead Software Engineer at Fabric Group with over 10 years of industry experience. He has worked extensively on data engineering problems, building ETL solutions and scalable event-driven systems. His interests include infrastructure automation and designing cloud-native solutions on AWS and Google Cloud.*

Hey everyone! If you're looking for a 5-a-side game, we have it happening **at East Caulfield Reserve every Wednesday, from 6-7 pm**. To join us, download the Stranger Soccer app and use the code **WELCOME** to book your first game for free if you're playing with us for the first time. We look forward to seeing you at the pitch then!

Please register for this event [here](https://factorhouse.io/events/melbourne-workshop-building-resilient-event-driven-systems-with-kafka-and-flink). **Go beyond theory and build a production-ready event stream** Join us for a practitioner-led, hands-on workshop where you'll design, build, and operate a complete real-time operational system from the ground up. We're teaming up with NetApp Instaclustr and Ververica to run this intensive half-day workshop. **What You'll Build** A resilient, real-time operational backbone powered by a Quarkus API, Kafka Streams, Apache Kafka®, and Apache Flink®. You'll implement a stateful order processing and inventory management system that processes live events in real time, the kind of critical infrastructure that powers payment processing, fleet coordination, inventory systems, and customer-facing applications across industries. **Two Architectural Patterns, One Mission** You'll implement and contrast two powerful approaches to building event-driven systems: **\- Pattern 1: Direct Event Publishing** Build a pipeline where the API writes events directly to Kafka, with a Flink job managing downstream state. Experience the challenges of application-level dual writes in real time. **\- Pattern 2: Change Data Capture \(CDC\)** Refactor for resilience by capturing database changes with CDC. Your API simplifies to database-only writes while Flink handles event publishing, demonstrating how CDC decouples applications from event pipelines and creates more robust data flows. **Operate With Confidence** Integrate **Kpow** and **Flex** to gain deep visibility into your Kafka and Flink data flows. You'll learn how to make your streaming systems more observable, accessible, and operationally efficient, skills that translate directly to production environments. **Who Should Attend** Software and data engineers, platform/SRE teams, and architects adopting streaming and event-driven architectures. Whether you're building payment systems, logistics platforms, or real-time analytics, this workshop gives you practical experience choosing the right patterns for your workloads. **Please note:** Spots are limited and attendees in engineering roles will be prioritised to ensure an optimal hands-on learning environment.

**At Happy Hour Toastmasters - We make public speaking** **FUN!** **Do you want to get better at speaking in front of people?** Maybe for that important presentation at work, or that big wedding speech you've been asked to give? Do you want to have fun and make a bunch of great new friends while doing it? Then **our club is the place for you!** Our club is a diverse and supportive group of people, from beginners to world championship finalist-level speakers, who meet regularly to practice and improve our public speaking skills. **You'll also** **learn:** * **leadership skills** * **networking and 'soft skills'** * **how to provide constructive feedback** * **how to control your 'ums' and 'ahs'** * **how to think quickly and creatively while speaking on your feet** * **and much more!** **Guests are welcome** to come to any of our meetings, and we are also to chat with you about questions you might have, so please get in touch! **Please note - Bookings are essential**, as we need to let you into the building when you arrive!

Hey all, please join us for our February Edition of the Melbourne Data Eng meetup. Join us for an engaging session filled with exciting discussions and networking opportunities. Don't miss out—RSVP to secure your spot. Please reach out if you'd like to host us! 🎉 🏠 Location: Stone & Chalk Melbourne 🍕 Catering: Easygo 😊 💬 Join our Slack Group here: [Data Engineers Slack Channel](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd09iTwpNulQH0b1BdslM1RzgImOGlX4WgOx6_rzvmVANwGmw/viewform) **Schedule:** \- 5\.30pm: Doors Open \- 6\.00pm: Announcements and Welcome \- 6\.10pm: 1st Talk \- 6\.40pm: 2nd Talk \- 7\.10pm: Networking \- 7\.30pm: Doors Close **Speakers:** 🎤 Anirban Roy Chowdhury, SD2 - Data engineering @ Easygo **Talk Title**: Multi tenant/region data engineering **Talk Summary**: Servicing multiple markets and challenges faced in multi-tenant architecture. **Speaker Bio**: Anirban is a versatile data professional with cross-industry expertise. Beginning his career as a software engineer at BlackRock in Delhi, India, he pursued his passion for data by relocating to Australia to earn a Master's in Data Science from Monash University. With experience spanning retail, consultancy, and real estate technology sectors, he specialise in bridging the gap between data insights and business outcomes. His work focuses on empowering organisations to implement data-driven decision-making processes that deliver measurable results. Through his practical approach to data engineering, he helped his teams to transform raw information into strategic assets that drive business growth. 🎤 Muhammad Ali, Sr. Solutions Architect at ClickHouse **Talk Title**: Engineering for Real-Time User-Facing Analytics **Talk Summary**: Building a dashboard for a dozen internal analysts is a solved problem. Building an analytical feature for a million concurrent users is an engineering nightmare. The fundamental laws of data processing change when we move analytics from the "back office" to the "front end”. In this session we will discuss engineering demands for building web facing low latency realtime analytics, and how to accomplish it without breaking the bank. **Speaker Bio**: Architecting the next generation of real-time AI workloads and observability If you'd like to **present** at future meetups, please submit your talk [here](https://dataengbytes.com/forms/meetup-talk)! Remember to bring along some great questions! See you all there...

RSVP at: https://www.meetup.com/melbourne-azure-nights/events/312980449/?utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=share-btn_savedevents_share_modal&utm_source=link&utm_version=v2&member_id=71480602 **AJ Bajada & Danidu Weerasinghe - What's new in Azure and GitHub** A fast, practical tour of the newest innovations across Azure and GitHub. We’ll break down the latest cloud capabilities, AI‑powered developer tools, security enhancements, and DevOps integrations that are transforming how teams build and ship software. **Dylan McCarthy - Managed DevOps Pools - Simplifying Build Agents for Azure DevOps** Managing build agents for Azure DevOps has always been a bit of a pain, requiring teams to create VMs or VM Scale Sets, maintain their images, manage spinning up and down resources to manage cost and build times. In this talk I want to show you how you can abstract away a lot of that pain by using Managed DevOps Pools. I will walk you through what the service is, it's features and then show you how to connect a pool to an Azure DevOps environment.

We will show a variety of methods for building agents that run in Microsoft Foundry. This covers the different types of agents: Prompt, Multi, and Hosted, as well as the development lifecycle using evals and traces.

Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! https://sessionize.com/cbus-hug-2026/

**Important time note:** Please plan on arriving between 5:30 and 6:00 as the elevators lock after 6 and you'll need to message us and we'll need to come get you. The building address is 4450 Bridge Park The entrance is 6620 Mooney St, Suite 400 **Abstract** TBD **YouTube Link** TBA

Join us as we get together to get together to help those in need at this CMG Gives Back event! For this event, we’ll help prepare food, serve meals, assist residents, wash dishes and clean surfaces at Fath Mission – Grant Kitchen. We have a great little community of Movie Group friends so rather than see a movie this time, we’ll help “Create a better world” by helping serve those in need. Here are complete details and our plan for this event: FAITH MISSION – GRANT KITCHEN: The Faith Mission kitchen and dining room serves residents 3 meals a day, every day of the year. Our group will help prepare food, serve meals, assist residents in the dining room, wash dishes, and clean surfaces. PLAN: We will be preparing / serving / cleaning for BRUNCH from 10:30am to 12:30pm and have space for a total of 7 volunteers. Please arrive at 10:15am and wear closed-toe shoes and long pants. LOCATION: Faith Mission – Grant Kitchen is located at 245 N. Grant Ave. Enter the kitchen at Dock 1, indicated in the attached map. On-site and street parking are available in the surrounding area. Below are some links / attachments with additional info/details: \* LSS Volunteer Guidelines: Uploaded to photos. \* Parking Map Info: Uploaded to photos. \* LSS Faith Mission Orientation Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp46_6ay6iA \* Link with Additional Details / Info: https://lss.vomo.org/opportunity/faith-mission-grant-kitchen-2025 IMPORTANT REMINDER: Our group will be providing the all of the volunteers on this day so a firm RSVP count is essential. Please only sign up if you are certain you’ll be able to attend. If something unavoidable comes up, please update your RSVP no later than one week prior to the event. With very few exceptions, no shows or cancelations within 1 week of the event will not be eligible for future CMG Gives Back events. I appreciate your understanding as we try to ensure the agencies have the volunteers needed to provide the essential services they provide to the vulnerable population they serve. THANK YOU: This CMG Gives Back event provides an opportunity for YOU to get involved in helping others! Benefits go well beyond the help we give to others. Volunteering provides a wide range of personal benefits, including positive effects on mental and physical health, reduced stress/depression/anxiety, increased happiness and improved purpose, life-satisfaction and personal well-being! Plus, the opportunity to get involved, connect with others and help those in need. PARTNER AGENCY: This event is hosted by Lutheran Social Services (LSS), which serves thousands of people in need each day in 27 Ohio counties by addressing the four core societal issues of food, shelter, safety and healing. LSS offers food through the LSS Food Pantries, housing and supportive services through LSS Faith Mission and LSS Faith Mission of Fairfield County homeless shelters, domestic violence services through LSS CHOICES for Victims of Domestic Violence, senior living and health care, affordable housing communities, and other services that uplift families and strengthen communities. Look forward to seeing you there, Dan

Join the Columbus AI community for our quarterly gathering — a casual, community-focused evening where everyone has a chance to share, learn, and connect. These open mic–style events give anyone in the community up to **5 minutes** to present a project, share a tool, pose a question, or offer a perspective on the evolving AI space. No slides required — just a welcoming space to exchange ideas and keep the local AI conversation moving. If you’d like to take the stage, message **Chris (the organizer)** with a **title and short description** of what you’d like to share. Whether you’re deep in the field or just getting curious, come connect with others building and exploring AI in Columbus. Sponsored by [Transform Labs](https://www.transformlabs.com/services)

WQC has weekly Thursday night social nights at the Westerville Java Central. Come and grab a coffee and connect with the community: low stakes, chill environment, and tasty drinks. No registration is required; come as you are.

**NEW LOCATION: Improving Office in Franklinton** Physical location: Improving Office 330 Rush Alley Suite #150 Columbus, OH 43215 Schedule: * 6:00 p.m.: Socialize, eat, and drink. Improving will be providing pizza and beverages. * 6:30 to 8:00 pm. Main meeting and presentation(s). See the handy Parking Map - we recommend street parking. [Street Parking Map](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1u2A4fLNlxwLJn0KA_hKc8bnFlFHLvsHBDh-_8wzX_tk/edit?usp=sharing) We meet on the last Monday of each Month. Presentations are given by members and friends of this group. If you would like to do a presentation (small or large) on a python topic, please contact centralohpython@gmail.com