SaaS (Software as a Service)

Are you ready to enjoy warmer spring evenings together again? We are, and that’s why we’re inviting you to our next Data & AI Engineering [applydata](https://applydata.io) Meetup, taking place at our Bucharest office on the 14th May. **Bogdan Beda:** ***"Beyond Syntax: The Evolving Role of the Software Engineer in the AI Era"*** [Bogdan Beda](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bogdan-beda/) is a Principal Software Engineer at [Microsoft](https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/), working on \*Copilot for Work\* backend, on a non-deterministic product using a codebase that is increasingly being generated by AI. In his presentation, Bogdan will explore the new essential toolkit for the AI era – moving beyond basic prompt engineering to mastering product development, from system design decisions to validating outputs. **Costin Vilcu: *"SOC Transformation in the AI Era"*** [Costin Vilcu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/costin-vilcu-oscp-pentester/) is an Information and Network Security Professional with 20+ years of experience, passionate about Penetration Testing, Security Consulting, Teaching and Social Communication. Costin's presentation explores how Security Operations Centers (SOCs) must evolve in the age of AI, from reactive monitoring to intelligent, autonomous threat detection and response. **Dana Juncu: *"The Invisible Threat: How a Sticker on a Traffic Sign Could Compromise Autonomous Vehicles"*** [Dana Juncu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/danajuncu/) is a Senior Product Manager at [Diconium](https://www.linkedin.com/company/diconium/posts/?feedView=all), working at the intersection of data, engineering, and product, owning end-to-end delivery of labeled datasets for ADAS & autonomous driving systems. In her presentation, Dana will cover why AI security is fundamentally different from traditional software security and what it actually takes to build robust, trustworthy AI in safety-critical domains. If you're curious, you can read more about the importance of Data Labeling in her previous blog articles: [Data Labeling as Continuous Service](https://applydata.io/data-labeling-as-a-continuous-service/) & [Traffic Sign Recognition at Scale](https://applydata.io/traffic-sign-recognition-at-scale-why-the-dataset-is-the-hard-part/) **What to expect:** * Three expert talks * Networking opportunities in our historical villa office * Some snacks & drinks **Timetable:** * 18:30 - Event admission * 19:00 - Welcome & introduction * 19:05 - First speaker * 19:30 - Second speaker * 20:00 - Third speaker * 20:30 - Connect & chat ✧ ✧ ✧ **Our goal is to form a local data-loving community, so join us and let's talk data together!** ✧ ✧ ✧ *At the event, sound, image and video recordings are created and published for documentation purposes as well as for the presentation of the event in publicly accessible media, on websites and blogs and for presentation on social media. By participating the event, the participant implicitly consents to the aforementioned photo and/or video recordings. Find [more information on data protection here](https://applydata.io/events/information-on-data-protection/).*

We will be meeting at Starbucks to learn together. Come with an online class you're already going through or an interest and we will try to connect you with a course where you can learn it. Already have a skill you want to contribute to a Kaggle Datascience competition? We will work on these too! Laptop required :)

We’re excited to bring the community together for an evening of learning and connection. This time, we'll have a community member from Chainguard sharing a use case and, as usual, an Elastic employee sharing their expertise as well. Come support your fellow developers, learn something new, and meet others who are passionate about search, observability, and security. **Date and Time:** Tuesday, May 19th, from 5:30-7:30 pm EDT **Location:** Elastic Arlington Office - 4100 Fairfax Drive, Ste 500, Arlington, VA 22203 **Agenda:** * 5:30 pm: Doors open; say hi, grab a seat, and eat some food. * 6:00 pm: The SBOM Pile in Your S3 Bucket: Turning Bills of Materials Into a Risk Dashboard; and Watching It Shrink with Chainguard, by Mike Barreta, Senior Manager, Engineering at Chainguard * 6:30 pm: Q&A * 6:40 pm: **Agentic Observability: Next-Gen Alerting and Auto-Detected Significant Events**, by Jason Rhodes, Senior Manager, Software Engineering at Elastic * 7:10 pm: Q&A * 7:20-7:30 pm: Networking & refreshments **Talk Abstracts:** **"The SBOM Pile in Your S3 Bucket: Turning Bills of Materials Into a Risk Dashboard; and Watching It Shrink with Chainguard**" Most organizations now generate SBOMs because someone — EO 14028, a FedRAMP auditor, an ISSM — told them to. They land in an S3 bucket, get versioned, and are almost universally never queried. This talk is about what happens when you finally do. I'll stand up a self-contained Elastic stack, pour in SBOMs (SPDX), SLSA provenance, Sigstore signatures, Grype vulnerability scans, the CISA KEV catalog, and OpenVEX adjudication for 30 container images, and show the queries that only become possible once SBOMs stop being compliance artifacts and start being telemetry: which packages I actually run right now, which CVEs are real exposures versus VEX-suppressed noise, what swapping a stock image for its Chainguard equivalent would buy me, and how much of my CVE list is just stuff I inherited from the base layer. Then the cleanup. The same dashboards on Chainguard images show what disappears when the SBOM is small, the signatures verify, and the advisory feed is active: \~9,000 fewer CVEs and \~2.5 GB saved across 20 image pairs, KEV exposure dropping from 7 hits to 0, compliance pass rate going from 0% to 76.5% against NIST 800-218 / FedRAMP Moderate / SSDF. **Bio:** Mike Barretta leads Chainguard’s public sector solutions engineering team, focused on helping ensure the federal government receives its fair share of the future. Barretta has worked across civilian, defense and intel programs in a variety of roles—software developer, data scientist, solution architect—for a variety of organizations—system integrators, consulting companies, software vendors—with the common purpose of creating and championing technologies and techniques for simplifying the extraction and utilization of information from lots of data. Having witnessed the ever-increasing threats to those systems, Barretta is now focused on methods and mitigations to secure them **Agentic Observability: Next-Gen Alerting and Auto-Detected Significant Events** We're rebuilding Elastic's alerting engine to make alerts more flexible\, more powerful\, and more valuable as data\. Next\-gen alerting rules will run anything ES\|QL supports and capture whatever fields matter to you\, so alerts carry the context you need for real downstream analysis\. And if you'd rather not manage these rules yourself\, AI agents can help\, drafting them from natural language\, recommending tuning and configuration changes\, and reducing noise through deduplication\. On top of this, we're also building a new Significant Events system which automatically builds a continuously updated knowledge base of your incoming data's own metadata. Using this deep understanding, our agentic tools will detect significant events from log patterns, anomalies, and predicted behavior — without you having to create a single rule. **Bio:** Jason Rhodes is a software engineering lead at Elastic, where he works on alerting and observability features. Based in the DC area, he has over 15 years of experience in software development and has been an active contributor to the local tech community — creating and organizing Baltimore NodeSchool and charmCityJS. When he's not writing and reviewing code, he's probably watching too many movies. **Parking:** * The building’s parking garage is operated by Colonial Parking and is located off N. Randolph Street * Book a spot on[ SpotHero](https://spothero.com/search?kind=address&latitude=38.8818514&longitude=-77.1095268&search_string=4100+Fairfax+Dr+%23500%2C+Arlington%2C+VA+22203%2C+USA) * A Metro Station is located across the street

**ProductTank NoVA is back!** After a brief hiatus, we are relaunching the chapter with a format that cuts out the fluff and gets straight to the reality of building. Every product feed is flooded with AI hype right now, but what does it actually look like on the ground? Instead of a polished keynote, we are hosting **0 to 1 with AI: Real Product Talks**—a "Show & Tell" featuring 3–4 lightning talks focused on the intersection of AI and product. The framing for the talks is simple: *"Here is what I'm building, and here is what I'm stuck on."* We want to look at the messy, 0-to-1 reality of integrating AI into your workflows and products. *(Want to share what you are working on? Reach out! The bar is low-pressure, just 10–12 minutes to talk about a real AI problem you are trying to solve.)* **Agenda:** * **5:30 PM - 6:00 PM:** Doors open, networking, & name tags * **6:00 PM - 6:10 PM:** Welcome + Chapter Relaunch Intro * **6:10 PM - 7:30 PM:** Lightning Talks (Three 12-min talks + 5 mins Q&A each, with a 5-min stretch break) * **7:30 PM - 8:00 PM:** Open networking * **8:00 PM:** Soft close **Location & Logistics:** Herndon Fortnightly Library (Extended Hours Meeting Room) 768 Center St, Herndon, VA 20170 * **Parking:** We'll meet at the library, located just behind the Herndon Municipal Center. There is plenty of free public parking available around the municipal center. * **Metro & Bus:** Take the Silver Line to Herndon Metro Station, then connect via Fairfax Connector Route 921 or 950 to Historic Downtown Herndon. * **Driving (via VA-267/Dulles Toll Rd):** Take Exit 10 North (Centreville Rd, which becomes Elden St). Turn left onto Station St or Lynn St. * **Driving (via VA-286/Fairfax Co Pkwy):** Take the Elden St West exit. Turn right onto Lynn St. Looking forward to seeing everyone again and getting back to building!

Attendance is $35 (cash, credit/debit card, or ApplePay - paid at the door), which includes water/soda/coffee, bread, choice of a plated lunch entrée, and a dessert assortment. Parking is also validated in the Reston Station garages (3 hours of validation). Join one of Northern Virginia's most successful business networking groups (part of BNI). Open to the public and is typically attended by business owners, business developers, and entrepreneurs. Meetings are typically attended by 30-40 members and guests. \*\*\*PLEASE RSVP here: [REGISTER HERE](https://square.link/u/0WvC6Eir) \*\*\*If you do not register on the BNI website, there may not be a seat available for you.

Most AI meetups end up as just networking. **We’re different.** At **AI Tool Explorers Night \| Connect & Make New Friends**, you’ll: ✨ Walk away with a *real learning nugget* (a tool, workflow, or strategy you can use immediately) ✨ Connect with people who share your curiosity for AI, productivity, and automation ✨ Enjoy a fun, casual setting where new ideas and friendships spark naturally 👉 **Our promise:** every session delivers structure, substance, and takeaways you can use when you get home. ### 📅 Event Flow * **6:00–6:15 PM** → Arrivals & intros * **6:15–6:45 PM** → AI demo / learning nugget * **6:45–7:00 PM** → Q&A and group discussion * **7:00–8:00 PM** → Networking & contact sharing ⚡ Please hold networking until after the presentation so we can all learn together. Plenty of time at the end to connect and exchange cards! **Let's explore AI Tools that actually *work* in our day-to-day life!** *** #ChatGPT #Claude #Grok #Gemini #Perplexity #DeepSeek #NotebookLM #Cursor #GitHubCopilot #Replit #Windsurf #v0dev #Lovable #Zapier #Makecom #n8n #Descript #OpusClip #Synthesia #Runway #Sora #Kling #Veo #PikaLabs #LTXStudio #AdobeFirefly #Vidu #Hailuo #LumaDreamMachine #Wisecut #Elaiio #Capsule #Filmora #Gling #Magisto #AdobePremierePro #ElevenLabs #Suno #Udio #Soundraw #Riffusion #Mubert #BeatovenAI #AIVA #Loudly #SplashPro #Soundful #MagentaStudio #WavTool #MakeBestMusic #BandLabSongStarter #TadAI #EcrettMusic #Midjourney #DALLE3 #CanvaMagicStudio #NotionAI #Gamma #Fathom #FirefliesAI #MLX