Information Retrieval

Come and lets talk Ubuntu talk. Come see the new Ubuntu 26.04. Bring your laptops and show off your favorite apps and your wallpaper. Got questions ? Bring them too ! Location and time: Monday 7pm May 25 2026 Bishop and Belchers pub Church and Bloor St E. 175 Bloor St E. Toronto, ON M4W 3T5 [(416) 591-2352](tel:+14165912352)

These monthly socials are a chance to network with other students and professionals in the geomatics field to chat GIS, data, remote sensing, surveying and more in a casual atmosphere. Feel free to bring friends and colleagues along - we're eager to welcome everyone back for a fantastic evening! This is a free event. Please RSVP to let us know you're attending.

Join Sandon Jacobs on Monday, May 25th from 6:00pm hosted by Improving! 📍**Venue:** **Improving Office** 171 East Liberty St Unit 235 Toronto, Ontario M6K 3P6 **Directions (171 E Liberty St - Suite 235)** **By transit** Streetcars 504 and 509 both travel close to the office (less than 10 minute walk to the office from either), the lakeshore GO train is also a 5 minute walk from the office. **By car/parking** On street parking is available - there are a handful of paid parking spots directly in front of the entrance - with a large city parking lot across the street. **Entrance** The entrance to the office is beside the Bulk Barn entrance facing Hannah Street. There is an Improving logo on the door. 🗓 **Agenda:** * 6:00pm – 6:30pm: Welcome, Food/Drinks & Networking * 6:30pm - 7:30 pm: **From Chaos to Contract: Governing Data Streams** by Sandon Jacobs **💡 Speaker Details:** Sandon Jacobs, Senior Developer Advocate, Confluent **From Chaos to Contract: Governing Data Streams** So you’re committed to this path of data streaming with Apache Kafka. But, here’s a question: would you build a REST API and make users guess the request and response formats? Doing so opens a Pandora’s Box… * What’s the domain model? * Name the operation… POST? GET? PUT? PATCH? * What does this error code even mean? * Is the documentation - if it even exists - accurate and relevant? * Imagine the complex, repetitive logic every consuming system would need to implement to make sense of it all. In a distributed, asynchronous system, these problems are magnified. Apache Kafka's flexibility—messages as simple bytes—is a huge strength, but it's also a major risk. While your event streams likely consist of some structured data (maybe JSON strings), enforcing structure, managing evolution, and basic validations aren’t a hard requirement. This leaves consumer applications to perform this preprocessing of every event - even if that event has no business value. In this session, we'll define data contracts and how to enforce them at the source - the applications that produce events. We’ll cover the practice of using a schema registry - supporting popular serialization formats like Apache Avro and Google Protobuf - to design events in the terminology of our business domain. Because data structures change over time, let’s discuss safe schema evolution practices. Then we’ll utilize these contracts with schema registry-aware producer and consumer code. We’ll end our time by looking at how smart CI/CD pipelines and build-time checks can add an extra layer of defense against the costly problem of poison data. It’s time to stop guessing and start governing. Join us to learn how to move validation upstream and transform your event streams into high-quality, discoverable data products. You’ll walk away with a practical blueprint for enforcing schema integrity and automating evolution—ensuring your data streams are a trusted asset. \*\*\* DISCLAIMER We don't cater to attendees under the age of 18. If you want to host or speak at a meetup, please email [community@confluent.io](http://community@confluent.io/)

🎟 **This is a paid event. Tickets must be purchased on Luma.** **Get yours: [https://luma.com/tiequest-2026](https://luma.com/tiequest-2026)** **\#\#\#\# TiEQuest Summit 2026 \- Building in Canada for the World** A morning built for founders who are done thinking small - and ready to hear how the best in Canada actually went global. **🧠 What to Expect** Sharp talks and practical insights from founders, operators, and investors who are actually doing the work. No fluff, just the real story of what it takes to scale ambitious companies from Toronto to the world. **🤝 Who's in the Room** Founders at every stage. Operators building something meaningful. Investors looking for what's next. If you're shaping the future of Canadian tech, you belong here. **📍 Where** U of T Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, one of Canada's most exciting hubs for tech and entrepreneurship. **📅 Monday, May 25, 2026** **⏰ 8:30AM – 12:30PM** **📍 108 College St, Toronto, ON**

Love cardio, rhythm, and good vibes? 💃 Join our Step & Shine class — a dynamic step aerobics workout that combines music, movement, and motivation! You’ll tone your legs, boost endurance, and burn calories while having fun in a friendly, supportive atmosphere. 🕖 When: Mondays & Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. 📍 Where: Easy Nutrition Health Club, 1750 Steeles Ave West, Unit 12, Concord ⚡ Only 9 spots available, so grab yours early! Perfect for all fitness levels — come for the workout, stay for the energy!

Call on 416-938-2223 to find me :) -Ritik

**[GrafanaCON Local](https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon-local/) Toronto - featuring the latest in AI Observability** Join us for a local edition of GrafanaCON — a recap of the keynote highlights combined with fresh voices from the Toronto community, all with an AI twist. We'll dig into actually useful uses of AI in observability, and how to add observability for AI workloads. Free to attend. Pizza and drinks provided. **Talks** 🎤 **Grafana 13: The road to AI-native observability** — Marylia Gutierrez, Principal Software Engineer @ Grafana Labs This talk will walk through Grafana 13 and the most impactful improvements across the platform. Learn how Grafana is continuing to invest in AI to become the first fully AI-native observability platform, and the default choice for agents. 🎤 **Scaling Grafana Assistant: Context, confidence, and AI observability** — Edward Qian, Staff Software Engineer @ Grafana Labs AI agents are only as powerful as the context they receive. In this session, we'll share lessons from building Grafana Assistant and offer practical tips for bringing the right context to get the most out of AI agents. 🎤 **AI tools to optimize your development workflow** — Cristiano Ventura, Senior Software Engineer @ Grafana Labs The way we write software has changed. AI systems read code, plan, execute shell commands, run tests, open PRs, and ship work end-to-end. This talk will showcase useful AI tools and concepts to improve your development workflow. **Agenda** 5:30 PM — Doors open, food + networking 6:00 PM — Talks begin \~8:00 PM — Networking continues 8:30 PM — Wrap *Note that by registering for this event you consent to related event & product communications from Grafana Labs and agree to our [code of conduct](https://grafana.com/events/events-code-of-conduct/).*

Don't be disappointed if you don't see a bunch of people attending. I advertise this on multiple platforms and the class usually sells out. \*\*If you don't use Paypal, email me at ralph@socap.ca and we'll figure it out. You can pay be etransfer or with a credit card/cash at the venue.\*\* Improv comedy uses several techniques to create laughter. These include, creating an atmosphere free of judgement, saying 'yes', active listening, being positive, putting your focus on others, and the importance of play and laughter. Not coincidentally, these are the same things that happen to us naturally when we are bonding with another person. In this class, we'll explore these techniques not with the goal of being funny, but with the goal of being people that other people want to be around. The teacher, Ralph MacLeod, is a co-founder of two independent improv clubs in Toronto - Bad Dog Theatre and Social Capital Theatre. He's been teaching improv for over 30 years. He also teaches these same techniques to several organizations including UofT, Google, Kraft, Shopify and many, many more. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have! FAQs and Good To Know.... After every event, a group from this class sit down and have a drink together so be prepared to stay if you want! Of course, you don't HAVE to. You also don't have to be single or bring a friend. The vibe of this class is much more 'making new friends' than a 'singles' mixer'. We usually run to 8:15 so pay for extra parking!

Can your agents scale without bankrupting your API quota or your compute budget? Join this session to explore a production-ready architecture that uses the LLM Council pattern, Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Java and Spring AI, all deployed on Cloud Run. And discover how replacing probabilistic reason-and-act (ReAct) loops with LLM Council enable goal-oriented action planning (GOAP) creates agents that are not only smarter but also significantly lighter and faster – making them the perfect workload for serverless execution. **About the venue** Free Times Cafe has bistro-style seating and a full food and drink menu. Please consider helping to support the venue by planning to have supper during the talk. **Speaker Bio** Dan Dobrin is an App Architect in Google Cloud, helping customer teams adopt modern AI technologies, cloud-native patterns, practices and technologies in GCP. Dan focuses on building GenAI applications, adopting AI coding assistance tooling with Gemini, Native Java Images, Spring AI, event-driven architectures, production-readiness and performance optimization. Prior to joining Google Cloud, he has built highly scalable, low-latency, frameworks for technology, security and financial services organizations.

Go Medieval! Learn Medieval arts, sciences, dancing and games! Have somefun with like minded history geeks. Tuesdays, 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm St. Andrew’s United Church 117 Bloor St EAST (near Church Street) Ring the buzzer for the gate keeper more info? www.eoforwic.ca

Hello everyone, I'd like to invite you out to our **Sunday Night with Friends-Dinner, Cocktails and Conversations** get together. -Reserved seating, friendly people, good conversation and great food awaits! So please plan to join us if you can :) \*Joined by my other groups too; so we can anticipate a fantastic evening **Time: 6:30 p.m. -9:30 p.m.** **Location:** La Carnita - Good Fortune Bar (Main Floor) **Address:** 130 Eglinton Ave. Toronto, ON M4P 2X9 Free Paring on Eglinton on Sundays on the North Side (Just East of the Restaurant) Event Details Bellow: Sincerely, Steve Flemming (Organizer/Host) Event Details: **Sunday Night with Friends! (Dinner, Cocktails and Conversations)** -The great thing about this dinner party is you're free to move around to different tables and meet the other members too throughout the evening **Dinner Party Topics** may include but not limited too: Travel, Culture, Spirituality, Relationships, Modern Dating, Life after Marriage, Work/Life balance, Art, Technology, Economy, Music, Movies, Sports, Fashion, Hobbies, Books, Psychology, Philosophy, the Future, History, Pop Culture, Theatre, Living the Good life etc.) **Arrival Time:** \*Join us any time between 6:30 pm and 7:15 pm (if you can) for a fun and highly interactive evening as we get to know the members over dinner and great conversations (of your choice) Event goes until roughly 9:30 pm (stay later if you like) **Event Fee:** 5 dollars (cash only please) (HST included) or in advance by e transfer to **[steveflemming11@gmail.com](http://steveflemming11@gmail.com/)** \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **Friendly Reminder:** \*One beverage or appetizer minimum to support the venue- this is greatly appreciated :) \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **Parking Available:** \*Plenty of free street parking on Eglinton and (Residential area south/east of venue for free) **Close to Subway Station:** \*Also right beside the Yonge/Eglinton subway station \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-

Welcome to the dbt Meetup, Toronto Tech Week 2026 Edition! dbt Meetups are networking events open to all folks working with data. Talks predominantly focus on community members' experience with dbt, however, you'll catch presentations on broader topics such as analytics engineering, AI, data stacks, data ops, modeling, testing, and team structures. **To attend, please read the Health and Safety Policy and Terms of Participation: [https://www.getdbt.com/legal/health-and-safety-policy](https://www.getdbt.com/legal/health-and-safety-policy)** Toronto Tech Week is a citywide celebration of the people building what’s next. From May 25–29, 2026, founders, investors, and builders come together for hundreds of community-led events across Toronto, connecting tens of thousands of people around Canadian tech. Torontotechweek.com. **Agenda** * 6:00 > Arrive, Eat, Drink, and be Merry (aka Socialize) * 6:30 > Speaker 1 and 2 presentations **Instructions**: * Meet at entrance and someone will escort you for check-in **Speaker Sessions:** **1st Speakers:** * [Josh Harris](https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-harris-86188983/), founder of AnswerLayer. * **Topic**: Open Semantic Interchange shipped in January 2026 with dbt Labs as one of the co-leading vendors. OSI v1.0: what it is, why it exists, and what it means for dbt users. **2nd Speaker:** * **TBD** * **Topic:** TBD Reach out if you're interested in volunteering/speaking! ➡️ Join the dbt Slack community: [https://www.getdbt.com/community/](https://www.getdbt.com/community/)🤝For the best Meetup experience, make sure to join the #local-toronto channel in dbt Slack ([https://slack.getdbt.com/](https://slack.getdbt.com/)). dbt is the standard in data transformation, used by over 40,000 organizations worldwide. Through the application of software engineering best practices like modularity, version control, testing, and documentation, dbt’s analytics engineering workflow helps teams work more efficiently to produce data the entire organization can trust. Learn more: [https://www.getdbt.com/](https://www.getdbt.com/)

Couldn't make Knowledge? Or want to debrief the dancing robots or Autonomous Workforce? Join us for a Knowledge '26 recap, insights sharing, a couple rounds of golf, and fun at Topgolf. As always, drinks and food will be provided. More details to come — mark your calendar, RSVP, and save your spot today!

**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 You will need to scan your ID at the door to get a visitor badge. **Abstract** Like it or not, AI agents are now capable of turning a quickly written paragraph of requirements into a pull request that is ready to be integrated into real-world production applications and it's now our responsibility to make sure AI doesn't go rogue and take down prod - or corrupt our data by misunderstanding the requirements or our existing schemas. In this session we'll explore strategies to protect our codebases through unit and integration testing, documentation, and code review along with additional ways of providing context and guard rails to our AI agents as they carry out the work we've assigned them to do. By the time we're done, you'll have a firm grasp of the problem and understand some helpful options for protecting your codebase from vibe coding mishaps getting YOLOed into prod. **YouTube Link** TBD

**Latest Dojo Location!** **Knotty Pine Brewing** 1765 W 3rd Ave, Columbus, OH 43212 We're going to try a new dojo location for a few weeks and see how it works Dojos are informal Python group study sessions where everyone interested in Python gathers to learn about Python, help others with Python, or just hang out. Everyone is welcome from Python beginners to experts. Bringing a laptop is encouraged (we'll have extension cords and power strips). If there's something you want to learn leave a comment on this invite so we can plan ahead. We're looking for speakers for our Monthly Meetups! Fill out the form if you are interested in presenting to the Python Community. https://forms.gle/ehSfUAC2WgR34Crq9

Most people use AI like a search box: they type one sentence, hope for the best, and get frustrated when the answer is generic, wrong, or useless. But getting better results from tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI systems is not about memorizing magic prompts. It is about learning how to give the AI better context. In this beginner-friendly session, we’ll break down how to make AI dramatically more useful by improving the way you communicate with it. You’ll learn how to give clearer instructions, provide examples, set constraints, ask for better output formats, and use follow-up questions to turn a mediocre answer into a genuinely useful one. We’ll cover practical techniques you can use immediately for work, learning, writing, coding, planning, research, and everyday problem solving. We’ll also touch on why these same ideas show up in more advanced AI systems, including RAG, agents, evaluations, and AI workflows. No technical background required. Bring your curiosity, your questions, and maybe one real task you wish AI was better at helping you with. **What you’ll learn:** * Why “better prompting” is really about better context * How to structure requests so AI gives more useful answers * How to use examples, constraints, and output formats * How to iterate when the first answer is not good enough * How these skills connect to more advanced AI workflows This meetup is for anyone who wants to move beyond basic ChatGPT usage and start getting more practical value out of AI. LOGISTICS AND PARKING: The talk starts at 7:00 PM. The first half hour is reserved for everyone to get set up and mingle. Free pizza and drinks! The cheapest parking option is to find street parking, which will only cost you a few bucks. Otherwise, park in the nearby veteran's museum lot for $8. It's highly recommended you avoid the nearby $15 garage parking.

The June Ohio North Database Training user group meeting will be held on **June 2nd, 2026 at 5:00PM**. This will be a **HYBRID** event and we will be joined online by **Sam Nasr.** You're welcome to come meet in-person at our meeting location, the offices of Improving at **[6000 Freedom Square Dr,](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Improving/@41.4004167,-81.6614462,17z/data=!3m2!4b1!5s0x8830e5b8255c5919:0xd8297060eb68fe04!4m6!3m5!1s0x8830dc7a0fe35dc9:0xbfc4710ecadfc5c!8m2!3d41.4004127!4d-81.6588713!16s%2Fg%2F1hm3hkqp3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQzMC4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D)** **[Unit 110,](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Improving/@41.4004167,-81.6614462,17z/data=!3m2!4b1!5s0x8830e5b8255c5919:0xd8297060eb68fe04!4m6!3m5!1s0x8830dc7a0fe35dc9:0xbfc4710ecadfc5c!8m2!3d41.4004127!4d-81.6588713!16s%2Fg%2F1hm3hkqp3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQzMC4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D)** **[Independence, OH 44131](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Improving/@41.4004167,-81.6614462,17z/data=!3m2!4b1!5s0x8830e5b8255c5919:0xd8297060eb68fe04!4m6!3m5!1s0x8830dc7a0fe35dc9:0xbfc4710ecadfc5c!8m2!3d41.4004127!4d-81.6588713!16s%2Fg%2F1hm3hkqp3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQzMC4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D)** [Teams Link ](https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/215625630917731?p=vxNb3zudhNj0S6Cg0v)if anyone needs it after RSVP-ing for in person. If you would like to subscribe to our email list outside of Meetup, we have changed platforms recently and you will need to register [here in Kit ](https://ohio-north-data-training.kit.com/b8f036f615)instead to receive emails. Agenda: **5:00 PM EST**: Online and in-person meeting begins with a social hour. This is an unstructured hour where you can join us to catch up and meet other group members before the session starts. There will be food brought in for in-person attendees. **6:00 PM EST**: Elections, announcements, followed by our feature presentation. See below for presentation details. **7:30 PM EST**: Optionally after the main presentations, the in-person crowd may go out for snacks and drinks at a local establishment. We hope to see you there! Session Abstract ### SQL Server 2025: The Developer’s Revolution Explore SQL Server 2025’s new dev features -JSON type, Regular Expressions, and Change Event Streaming for real-time pipelines. See how REST API and Data API Builder turn your data into secure, high-performance APIs. Packed with demos, this session is perfect for developers, DBAs, and architects \*Please note, that we will be using Microsoft Teams for the online portion of this meeting. You may want to join a few minutes early to ensure you do not have any issues. If you are attending in person, there are large TVs at the office, and you do not need to bring a laptop or use Teams.

QA or the Highway is a one-day, affordable, regional, professional conference featuring real-world experience and thought leadership in the QA and testing industry. This is a ticketed event please register here: https://www.qaorthehwy.com/ Featured Keynote Speakers: **Matthew-Hope Eland** **(Wizard at Leading EDJE)** \- An AI Specialist and Wizard at Leading EDJE who is known to teach software engineering\, AI\, and data science concepts in the most ridiculous ways possible\. Matt has used machine learning to settle debates over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie\, reinforcement learning to drive the behavior of digital squirrels\, data analytics to suggest improvements to his favorite TV show\, and AI agents to play board games and create an AI agent with the personality of a dog\. Matt is the author of "Data Science in \.NET with Polyglot Notebooks" and "Refactoring with C\#" as well as several LinkedIn Learning courses\. Matt helps organize the Central Ohio \.NET Developer Group\, runs several blogs and a YouTube channel\, has a Master’s of Science in Data Analytics\, and is a current Microsoft MVP in AI and \.NET\. **Tatyana Arbouzova** **(CEO at Innovate QA)** \- Tatyana Arbouzova is an engineering and business leader with a strong background in Quality Engineering across multiple industries\, including Big Tech\, Healthcare\, and Entertainment\. She has held leadership roles at world\-class companies such as Microsoft\, VMware\, Disney\, and The Pokémon Company International\, where she focused on building quality\-driven cultures and scaling teams to deliver high\-impact products\. With decades of experience\, Tatyana has helped organizations transform their quality practices so teams can deliver software efficiently\, confidently\, and with measurable business outcomes\. Today\, Tatyana advises software companies on adopting AI to optimize quality practices and improve how software is delivered at scale\. She is also a passionate community builder and the founder of Innovate QA\, a thriving Seattle\-based community and conference for quality professionals\.