Machine Learning

**Welcome to the Sixth BDEN Meetup!** AI is moving fast, and developers are right in the middle of it. Some are already experimenting with AI-assisted coding, agents, MCP servers, and local models. Others are still trying to understand what all these new concepts really mean and where to start. This meetup is designed for both. For our sixth Belgian Developer Experience Network meetup, we will focus on what AI means for developers today: how agentic systems are built, how they can be used safely, and what it takes to bring them closer to production in an enterprise context. As always, expect more than slideware. We will have explanations, demos, real-world discussion, and enough space for questions and networking. Mark your calendars for the 4th of June, because it is going to be an evening packed with practical insights into AI, agents, developer workflows, and production readiness. **Location** This meetup will take place as part of Red Hat Tech Day Belgium, hosted at The Montil in Affligem. Red Hat Tech Day is a one-day conference for both technical and non-technical audiences. This year, for the first time, the event will also include a dedicated developer track, focused on the latest technologies and methodologies from the AI and software development communities. You are also welcome to register for the full event here: https://reg.experiences.redhat.com/flow/redhat/3977379/fieldeventsregapproveform/page/landingregistrationpage **Schedule** 17:00 - 18:00 Doors open 18:00 - 18:15 Intro session 18:15 - 19:15 AI agents, skills, demos and sandboxing 19:15 - 19:30 Break 19:30 - 20:30 Panel discussion: putting agentic AI in production 20:30 - 22:00 Networking & food **Sessions** **Session 1: AI agents, skills, demos and sandboxing** **Speaker:** Burr Sutter, Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat **Description:** AI is no longer just about sending prompts to a chatbot. Developers are now exploring skills, agents, tools, MCP servers, and workflows where AI systems can take action instead of only generating text. In this session, Burr Sutter will explain what skills and agents are, how they work, and why they matter for developers. Through demos, he will show how these concepts are implemented and defined within Red Hat, and how agentic systems can be sandboxed with technologies such as OpenClaw. Whether you are new to AI or already experimenting with agents in your own workflow, this session will help you connect the concepts to practical developer use cases. **Session 2: Panel discussion: putting agentic AI in production** **Panel participants:** Burr Sutter, Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat Stephan Janssen, founder of Devoxx and organizer of Devoxx Belgium One mystery guest, to be announced later this week **Description:** Building a demo with AI is one thing. Putting AI, and especially agentic AI, into production is something else. After a short break, we will continue with a panel discussion on what it takes to use AI safely and effectively inside an organization. We will discuss how to get started, what developers should keep in mind, what organizations need to prepare for, and how to think about governance, security, reliability, and platform support. The panel will bring together different perspectives from developer experience, AI-assisted software development, enterprise readiness, and the changing role of developers in the age of intelligent systems. This panel is for developers who are curious about AI, developers already using AI tools, and teams wondering how to move from experimentation to real adoption. **About Stephan Janssen** Stephan Janssen is the founder of Devoxx and organizer of Devoxx Belgium. In recent years, his work has focused heavily on LLMs, AI-assisted software development, and Agentic Engineering. He actively explores technologies such as local and cloud-based LLMs, multi-agent systems, MCP, RAG, Spec-Driven Development, and AI-powered developer workflows. Stephan is also the creator of DevoxxGenie, an open-source IntelliJ IDEA plugin that enables developers to interact with local and remote LLMs directly from their IDE. Through talks, workshops, and R&D projects, he focuses on how AI agents are transforming software engineering and how developers are evolving from traditional coders into orchestrators of intelligent systems. More info: [https://stephanjanssen.be](https://stephanjanssen.be/) **About Philippe Bogaerts**: And our next panel speaker is Philippe Bogaerts. Philippe is co-founder and organizer of BruCON, and an enthusiastic researcher and trainer in the world of building, securing, and hacking agentic systems. He is also a wonderful public speaker. Philippe has already presented twice at BDEN, and every time he brings exactly the kind of energy we love: hands-on, practical, sharp, and anything but boring slideware. It is a pleasure to see him explore, break, test, and hack in the agentic AI space. He is one of those speakers who keeps you interested from the first second to the last, because he does not just talk about the topic. He actually gets his hands dirty. With Philippe joining Burr Sutter and Stephan Janssen, this panel is shaping up to be something special. Really looking forward to this one. **Additional note** ***This meetup includes food. Please keep your RSVP status up to date so we do not waste any food. In case you are no longer sure you can join in person, please update your RSVP accordingly.***

Thirty meetups! It feels surreal to think back to the very first Belgium NLP Meetup in 2016, when our opening talk posed the question: *is there a market for NLP?* Safe to say, almost ten years later we have our answer. Our thirtieth event will take place on **Thursday June 4th** in the offices of **Ravical in Ghent**, an AI company that discovers revenue opportunities in documents and helps full-service firms act on them. As usual, doors open at 7pm for pizza, talks are planned between 7.30pm and 9pm, and after that there's more time for networking and drinks. The first two talks of the evening are already confirmed. The final presentation will be announced in the coming weeks. Stay tuned! **The Context Window Is Not Enough: Why Real Work is Hard for AI Agents** *Kasper Rutten (Archer and Summit)* Language models often begin from a blank slate, while humans rarely do. Every professional task carries a hidden bundle of context: prior conversations, organizational history, domain conventions, emotional stakes, implicit constraints, and memories of what has and has not worked before. This talk explores that contextuality of work through the lens of software engineering in a complex environment, alternating between lived practice and what neuroscience tells us about memory, attention, and recall. From there, we map the same example onto modern AI systems, distinguishing between pre-training, post-training, and in-context learning, and showing where today’s techniques for context management help or fall short. The final part reflects on what this means for the future of AI agents. Rather than assuming instant, economy-wide automation, the talk argues for a more nuanced timeline: one where progress depends less on raw intelligence alone, and more on how well systems can acquire, preserve, and act on context. **Hermit: an experiment in autonomous applications** *Ben Schrauwen* Ben sees a new category of software emerging, autonomous applications, and built a small open-source project, Hermit, to explore that idea. Most AI products add an assistant to a static app: fixed workflows, fixed UI, fixed logic. An autonomous application is different. The agent is not a feature inside the product. It is the operator of the product. It owns the workflow, shapes the data model, generates the interface, writes code and skills, and evolves the system over time. The agent is the primary interface: you work through it, but you can still inspect the underlying state directly, while it generates the views needed to make that state legible. **Safe natural-language-to-code execution to level up your AI product** *Nico Gelders (Ravical)* Generative AI tools struggle when users ask data-heavy questions, and function calling alone doesn't offer a reliable solution. Nico will show how compiling natural language into sandboxed TypeScript instead (using typed tool schemas as grammar) enables parallel API chaining and produces high-quality, reproducible artefacts. Expect practical lessons from running NL-to-code pipelines in production, including where this pattern works and where it breaks down.

Join our next meetup at Collibra on June 4th! We will have 3 talks about OpenTelemetry and will share some food and drinks while networking **Location:** Collibra, Rue Picard 11, 1000 Bruxelles **Agenda:** 17:45 : Doors open 18:00 - 18:30 : Drinks and pizza 18:30 - 19:10 : Talk #1 OpenTelemery on Kubernetes with EDOT: Getting started and what's ahead 19:10 - 19:50 : Talk #2 Taming Tenancy, Cost and Architecture at Collibra Through OpenTelemetry and Our Telemetry Backbone 19:50 - 20.30 : Talk #3 Closing the Observability Gap: OpenTelemetry Meets Elastic at Telenet 20:30 : Wrap up **Talks:** **#1 OpenTelemery on Kubernetes with EDOT: Getting started and what's ahead** **OpenTelemetry has become the default way to instrument applications and infrastructure, and Kubernetes is one of the places where it makes most sense to use it.** This talk is a tour of OpenTelemetry on Kubernetes, focusing on the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT). We will explore the OTel basics (general architecture, signals) and the recommended way to deploy OTel on Kubernetes using the OpenTelemetry Operator. A live demo with an Elastic backend will showcase the correlation of metrics and logs, demonstrating how everything ties in together. Finally, it will cover the current community effort to stabilize Kubernetes observability, including the promotion of Kubernetes attributes to release candidate status and the latest updates to the semantic conventions for Kubernetes metrics. This session is useful for beginners trying to get into OTel, and for those running OTel in their Kubernetes cluster and trying to get some insights on what is to come. *Speaker: João Marques Correia, Software Engineer at Elastic* **#2 Taming Tenancy, Cost and Architecture at Collibra Through OpenTelemetry and Our Telemetry Backbone** Operating a SaaS platform presents the same observability problems as any other enterprise, but due to the scale and tenancy, we introduce a huge multiplier on the observability signals, having an effect on cost and effectiveness. This session dives into the techniques Collibra used to tame these problems and how to maintain clarity when infrastructure spans virtual machines, modern Kubernetes clusters, and a complex mix of single- and multi-tenant architectures. Without the right context, telemetry data becomes a noisy, indistinguishable flood. We will dive into the architectural decision to leverage the C4 system model, ensuring every piece of telemetry carries the vital context of what it belongs to and where it sits in the hierarchy. Enabling us to gain insights into both signal attribution and allowing virtual chargebacks. The presentation details the implementation of a pipeline using custom-built OpenTelemetry collectors designed to handle the data and enrich it before sending it to the appropriate backends. This session will give you practical insights on the challenges SaaS platforms have, but the techniques that are used to tame them can be applied everywhere. *Speaker: Alex Van Boxel, Principal System Architect at Collibra* **#3 Closing the Observability Gap: OpenTelemetry Meets Elastic at Telenet** Modern systems generate more telemetry than ever, but without consistency, that data quickly becomes noise. At Telenet, we turned to OpenTelemetry to standardise how we collect and enrich observability data across our bare-metal Kubernetes clusters. This talk dives into how we integrate OpenTelemetry into our engineering workflows and couple it with Elastic for storage, analysis, and visualisation. We’ll walk through our architecture, instrumentation strategies, and how we ensure high-quality telemetry that engineers trust. Along the way, we’ll highlight real use cases, from debugging production incidents to improving service performance, and discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently today. If you're an Elastic user looking to adopt or scale OpenTelemetry, this session will help you bridge the gap between theory and practice. *Speaker: Reidar Veroft, Container Platform Engineer at Telenetgroup* **Bios** **Alex Van Boxel** is a Principal System Architect at **Collibra**. With an engineering background in Research and Development at Alcatel-Lucent, Progress Software, and Veepee he loves to focus on the fundamental building blocks of the software industry. That means reading, understanding, and contributing to specifications, as well as contributing to the Open Source projects that run through our infrastructure. He is code-owner of two components of the OpenTelemetry collector. **João Marques Correia** is a Software Engineer at **Elastic**. Having recently joined Elastic, he has been focusing on OpenTelemetry, with a bigger effort being put into Kubernetes metrics stabilization. Before joining Elastic, he worked as a Software Engineer at Cisco on a Data Center network controller. He is drawn to distributed systems, and in particular how to observe them and keep them working reliably. **Reidar Veroft** is a DevOps Engineer at **Telenet**, where he builds observable, reliable systems that power critical infrastructure across Belgium. From the 5G core to our voice core, he focuses on making sure the systems behind Telenetgroup are not only running, but fully understood through high-quality telemetry. **Thanks to Collibra for hosting this meetup!**

Making the new Friends after work or in your vacation.

🇬🇧 EN 🇬🇧 🔥 SALSA CUBANA CLASSES ARE BACK 🔥 We are delighted to see you again for the start of the 2025/26 academic year 👉 Find all the needed information on our website : **[https://danzamania.be/](https://danzamania.be/horaires/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBExUjNGU3gzRWdsUFlWMGJMQgEeCHgiKV40mum5hOp5szt0Lxx3U-5DyHO_wR_ZJekcr_m7EFRdpcRthKRV9EU_aem_W6hFXCri8O6Kd9el-RIuIQ)** ✅ PROGRAMME ✅ 👉 TUESDAY 16/09 7:00-8:00 pm - Salsa Level 1A @ Salle Oxygène - Angie, Octavia & Raffa 8:15-9:15 pm - Salsa Niveau 1B\* @ Salle Ste Suzanne - Tine & Sam 8:00-9:00 pm - Salsa Cubana Level 2 @ Salle Oxygène - Angie, Octavia & Raffa \*The Level 1B course is the same as the Level 1A course. It will be taught by Tine & Samuel and starts at 8.15 p.m. It allows those who wish to arrive one hour later and have a group of about 10 people. 👉 WEDNESDAY 17/09 7:00-7:30 pm - Body Expression @ Salle Oxygène - Yusnay, Tine & Raffa 7:30-8:30 pm - Salsa Level 3 @ Salle Oxygène - Yusnay, Tine & Raffa 8:30-9:30 pm - Salsa Level 4 @ Salle Oxygène - Yusnay, Tine & Raffa 👉 THURSDAY 18/09 8:00-9:00 pm - Cuban Salsa Partnerwork - Level 1 + @ Studio Empain - Zoli 9:00-10:00 pm - Cuban Salsa Partnerwork - Level 2 + @ Studio Empain - Zoli 👉 FRIDAY 19/09 8:30-9:30 pm - Rueda de Casino @ Vibrato - Team Danza Mania 9:30-12:30 am - Practica & Entertainment with DJ Joel 💃 Dale Mambo🕺

Socializing and Networking 🛜🆕 at PLUX on Thursday. Making new friends and drinking 🚰🎈🎉🚿🌊. Everybody Welocme, locals, expats or new 🆕 in town.

Join us for a laid-back **2-hour evening walk** in the green surrouindings of Brussels. Expect a **social, easy-paced stroll** with good company, relaxed vibes, and plenty of time to chat. We'll follow the canal paths and trace the River Zenne, discovering how these waterways shaped the heart of the city. 🕗 **When:** Evening 🚶 **Duration:** About 2 hours 🥤 **Bring your own drink** – something refreshing to enjoy as we walk 💬 **Open to all** – solo walkers, locals, and newcomers alike Let’s walk, relax, and connect—Brussels-style.

What's up Friends! 👋 

Ready for some bouldering fun? Boulder-what? 🤔 It’s climbing (FR: escalade, le bloc) up to 4.5m high without ropes—and in my case, without much hope! 😂✨ It’s a super fun indoor activity, but be warned: it does require a certain level of physical fitness and/or skill. Most importantly, though, it requires awesome company—which we’ve got! 😎

 The Idea: 📍 Meeting Point: For those arriving at 18:00, we’ll meet at the cafeteria (next to the billiards table). Feel free to start earlier or later—just drop me a message or write in the group chat so we can meet up. 💪 Stay & climb as long as you want - venue closes at midnight! 🥤 Recharge: If you’ve had enough climbing for the day (we usually do this after 2 hours of climbing), we may head back to the cafeteria (or to the rooftop if it's sunny🌤️) for snacks, drinks & games. Cafeteria closes at 22:00. Where: 📍Arkose: (Brussels Canal) Rue Willy de Bruyn Straat 52, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgique 🔗 https://arkose.com/

Fees: 🤑Entry fee without shoes: * 18 eur (first-timers 10€ with online promo activated) * reduced rates: students, minors, job seekers, firefighters, military (proof required) 👟 Shoe Rental: 5€ (if you don’t have your own) 🎫 10-session pass: 135€

 Good to Know: ✍️ First-timers need to create an account (takes 5min) - do it in advance and pay online to pay less and avoid wasting time onsite 💦 Hydration is key! Bring a water bottle. 🔐 Lockers available, but bring your own padlock. 🚿 Changing rooms & showers on-site. 👕 Wear comfy sports clothes—it gets intense! 🧴 Only liquid magnesium is allowed (for grip) - in reality most people use powder🤫 👟 Thinking of going regularly? Bouldering shoes are a great investment! (Decathlon: ~45-65€ per pair.)

⚠️ Safety First! Bouldering is fun, but safety comes first! Stay alert, know your limits, and don’t take unnecessary risks. Enjoy responsibly! 💪 

📢 Further details may be shared via the group chat or via DM 💬. Make sure to check your messages 👀 at least on the day before the event to avoid missing critical 🙄 announcements. 🐈‍⬛ The Friends Code:
👉Respect and positive vibes, if not 💥🥊
👉Can’t make it? Cancel or drop a message in the chat - helps running things smoothly! 👉 Don't show up if you are on the waiting list or show up at your own risk. 

See you at the walls folks😉

Have you always wanted to learn Bachata? Now is the perfect time! Our regular classes at Albert Hall are designed to help beginners progress quickly and master this beautiful social dance that is very popular right now! 💃🕺 We have just started a new session where everyone can learn at their own pace. Come with or without a partner. After the beginner's class, there are more advanced classes, followed by a free dance party for students. 🎉 A nice venue and a warm atmosphere—don't miss this opportunity! 🔥 PROGRAM 🔥 7:00 p.m. → Bachata Beginner NEW (Room 1) 7:00 p.m. → Bachata Advanced (Room 2) 8:00 p.m. → Bachata Beginner II (Room 1) 9:00 p.m. → Bachata Intermediate (Room 1) 💥 10:00 p.m. → Bachata Social Party with DJ Felito on the decks for a wild night of dancing! 🎶 🍍 Fresh fruit buffet provided to recharge your batteries between dances! 📍 Location: Albert Hall 651 chaussée de Wavre 1040 Brussels 💸 Prices: 1 class: €15 10-class pass: €120 20-class pass: €210 Dance party only: €10 (cash) 👉 Registration on site

Need some quiet time for reading? Want to share the experience with others? Join us at the charming venue of The Sister Café to read in the company of others. It’s alone, but also together, get it? We read for an hour and a half, then chat over a drink. This is a free activity except for the price of the drinks you're consuming.

Join Us for a Meditative Forest Walk We warmly invite you to a silent, meditative walk through the forest, where we will move together in stillness for about one hour. This gentle practice helps you reconnect with nature, slow down the mind, and notice the subtle details—both around you and within you. By walking silently, we create space for calm, clarity, and unexpected insights. Details: Date & Time: Saturday 6 June Meeting Point: Herrmann Debroux Metro (exit straight ahead after leaving the platform) Start Time: We begin walking at 16:10 sharp, so please arrive on time if you plan to join. Practical Note: Please wear weather-proof walking shoes, as the forest paths can get a bit muddy when rainy. After the walk, you are warmly welcome to join for a drink at Rouge Cloître. It’s a cosy, creative space to end the evening together if you feel like staying on. If you're in the mood for a quiet inward journey, we would be delighted to walk with you this Friday. For any questions or to let me know you’re coming, feel free to contact me at 0474 60 83 70. Looking forward to sharing this peaceful moment with you.

Welcome to our weekly event in the upstairs room of The Sister Café, rue Chair et Pain 3, one block from the Grand Place. Please get there early enough to order your drink at the bar first. Thank you! After introductions we will collect questions from the group participants, choose one by voting then discuss it for an hour. Then most of us stay for drinks and bizarre conversations. Past questions have been wide and not confined to academic philosophy: What is a genuine friend? Is social media turning us into emotional zombies? Do we lose some of the experience of things by defining them? Are we driven by sex? Is loneliness a personal failure? Is morality relative? **Crucially, be kind and respectful and generous** in your disagreements; remember how much you personally enjoy someone else proving you wrong before celebrating your cutting counterexamples.

Making news Friends doesn’t not be hard at all🤍❤️

Most people still use AI like a search box: type one question, get one answer, repeat. But the next step is AI agents: systems that can take a goal, break it into steps, use tools, remember context, and produce useful work for a human to review. In this beginner-friendly session, we’ll demystify what AI agents actually are — without hype or jargon. We’ll walk through practical examples of how agents can help with research, planning, writing, coding, operations, and personal productivity. We’ll cover: * What makes an AI “agent” instead of just a chatbot * How agents break tasks into steps * Where agents are genuinely useful today * Where they fail, hallucinate, or need human review * How to design simple AI workflows for your own work * A live demo of an AI agent-style workflow from start to finish No coding experience required. This is for anyone who wants to understand where AI tools are going and how to use them more effectively right now. 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.

## 🤝 Host Information A co-hosted event by ProductTank Columbus & Women in Product Columbus 💡 About the Workshop AI adoption is stalling across organizations — not because of a lack of motivation or tools, but because it's fundamentally a behavior design challenge. This hands-on workshop applies proven Behavior Design models and methods to help you move from a vague organizational wish to boost AI adoption to 3-5 concrete, testable interventions you can act on starting tomorrow. Whether you're a product manager, on a product team, or just someone trying to get AI to actually stick at work, you'll leave with a clear picture of what's worth focusing on, what to ignore, and how to drive real, sustained adoption — no guesswork required. 🛠️ What to Bring Laptop: Fully charged and ready to go. AI Assistant: Have your favorite AI assistant pulled up. (Dom will be using Claude, but feel free to use whichever assistant you prefer!) 🍕 Logistics & Perks Food & Drink: Pizza and drinks provided! Parking: Plenty of free spaces available on-site. ###

Topic to be announced. **THANK YOU** *Franklin University* for hosting our meetup! To learn more about *Franklin University*, please visit their website: https://www.franklin.edu/ **DIRECTIONS** Franklin University Fisher Hall 300 E. Main St, Columbus, OH 43215 Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jxjBA2hUmS5qrvhq8 Parking is FREE! Please park in Lot C in front of Fisher Hall. See attached map. NOTE: Map the address only. When mapping with Google Maps it may use the Fisher Hall at OSU, which is NOT correct. **Want to sponsor the pizza and/or bar tab?** Please contact me if you would like to sponsor this meetup's pizza and/or bar tab: angelo@mandato.com

**The Behavior Gap: Where Products Win or Lose** Teams today have more data than ever, and yet many still struggle to understand why customers adopt, engage with, or abandon their products. Teams sprint, ship faster, and chase more signals… all while metrics stall and confidence drops. The missing piece isn’t more data. It’s often the behavioral insight between the metrics, explaining why the numbers move in the first place. Dashboards can tell you what customers did, but understanding why they did it (and how to influence what they do next) requires a deeper blend of insights. This session is about closing that gap. Drawing from real-world experience designing and scaling products as [ZoCo Design](https://zocodesign.com/)’s CEO, [Lacey](https://www.linkedin.com/in/laceypicazo/) will share how to cut through the noise and identify the insights that actually change behavior—moving people, and moving metrics. You’ll learn: * Why understanding customer behavior is a quant and qual challenge * How to spot the signals that actually predict behavior change * Where AI accelerates insight, and where it creates distraction * How to get meaningfully closer to customers, without adding more tools This talk reframes how to evaluate performance and identify what levers actually improve it, helping your team to make smarter bets with greater confidence. Every meaningful outcome is driven by behavior change. And when you know how to design for behavior, you stop guessing, and start building things that work. **About Our Speaker** [Lacey Picazo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/laceypicazo/) is the Founder and CEO of ZoCo, a healthcare product studio that turns complex, high-stakes ideas into products that drive real-world adoption. She partners with healthcare organizations to uncover critical care delivery insights, focus product strategy through behavior design, and build solutions that patients and providers actually use. Thanks to our 2026 sponsors: [Clarivoy](https://www.clarivoy.com), [What Box Consulting Group](https://www.whatboxconsultinggroup.com), [Conductrics](https://www.conductrics.com), and [Piwik PRO](https://piwik.pro) More info at [cbusdaw.com](https://cbusdaw.com)

If you enjoy knitting, crocheting, working with yarn, this is the group for you. Meet new friends, bring your projects, learn from others.
We normally meet a few times a month during the week from 6-8pm. We will occasionally meet on weekends during daytime hours.