Agentic AI Tooling & Context Engineering in Practice
Details
Hello everyone!
We’re excited to announce the first Vienna AI Engineering Meetup of the year on Tuesday, January 27! This time we’ll be hosted by Eversports at their office next to Praterstern.
Alex Gavrilescu, the creator of Backlog.md, will kick off the meetup with his talk about “The Cambrian Explosion of Agentic AI”. At the end of the talk you will have a good mental model of the current Agentic AI tooling landscape, which will hopefully make it easier for you to separate the wheat from the chaff in this space.
Then, Anna Saranti will talk about "Context Engineering in Practice" and the lessons learned from putting Document RAG in production at RINGANA.
Join us to explore the future of AI Engineering together!
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Here are the detailed abstracts:
The Cambrian Explosion of Agentic AI (Alex Gavrilescu)
The landscape of AI coding tools is exploding. We evolved quickly from simple autocomplete to the GitHub Copilot era, and now we face a new wave of Agentic CLI tools, protocols like MCP, ACP and A2A, and frameworks like ADK. It moves so fast that catching up feels impossible.
This talk aims to ground us. I will guide you through this explosion of tools, separating the hype from the reality. We will focus on practical applications and identify the specific tools that actually help us ship real software right now.
Context Engineering in Practice: From Documents to Answers with VectorDBs (Anna Saranti)
This talk focuses on the practical steps of digitalisation faced by organizations working with large, heterogeneous documents. Text and images must be preprocessed, stored, retrieved, and evaluated before they can reliably power AI systems.
- Text Chunking Strategies: Semantic, late, and agentic chunking, with a focus on the pros and cons.
- Vector Databases in Practice: Weaviate & Pinecone comparison through a practical scenario.
- Query & Result Pre-processing and post-processing of retrieved results with an impact on relevance and context usability.
- Evaluating Retrieval Quality: Evaluation of retrieved context and generated answers against human-defined ground truth through RAGAS.
- Context Engineering as a discipline.
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About the speakers:
- Alex Gavrilescu leads backend & web engineering at Funstage GmbH in Vienna, keeping millions of free‑to‑play gamers happily tapping. He still ships code, tinkers with Raspberry Pi Kubernetes clusters for fun, and is passionate about weaving project‑management smarts with practical AI. Most recently he created Backlog.md, a micro‑tool that turns side‑project chaos into shippable tasks.
- Anna Saranti is an AI Engineer at RINGANA, where she works on data-driven evaluations and the development of intelligent multi-agent systems using frameworks such as CrewAI and LangGraph, supported by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). She holds both an MSc and a PhD in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI), each awarded with distinction from Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). Before joining RINGANA, she served as a tutor and Postdoctoral Researcher at several universities in Austria. Anna’s research and professional interests include the practical application of AgenticAI, time-series forecasting, and causal modelling with counterfactuals. She also brings extensive industry experience as a software developer, data scientist, and AI engineer across multiple technology sectors.
-------------------- Schedule -------------------
18:00 - Get together with food and beverages
18:30 - Welcome talk by Eversports
18:40 - "The Cambrian Explosion of Agentic AI" (Alex Gavrilescu)
19:25 - Short break
19:30 - "Context Engineering in Practice" (Anna Saranti)
20:15 - More drinks & networking.
Looking forward to seeing you on January 27th!
-------------------- Location -------------------
Eversport GmbH
Jakov-Lind-Strasse 13 / Door 6 / 5th Floor
1020 Vienna
----------------------- Sponsor ---------------------
This event is generously sponsored by Eversports. Thank you! 🙏