July 30 - Zurich AI, ML and Computer Vision Meetup
Details
Join our in-person Meetup to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.
Date, Time and Location
Jul 30, 2026
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM CEST
Westhive, Hardturmstrasse 161, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland
Agentic RAG and the complexity of navigating the unknown
Traditional Agentic RAG is great when we know what we’re looking for, or when the LLM knows how to plan the task. But what happens when our questions sound more like: Does a falling apple have anything to do with why we walk? Would AI, specifically Agentic RAG, know where to begin?
LLMs are promising, but they still have limits: they can over-rely on semantic similarity and miss the strange, indirect connections that often drive discovery. Innovation means navigating new territory, where the unknown is not a bug but the constant.
How do we use the technology we have to explore what we don’t yet fully know? How do we build AI systems that help us get deep insights into the topic we are interested on.
About the Speaker
Desara Xhura is a computer scientist and founder of SageWrite, an AI-powered platform for researchers, launched in 2021 shortly before AI started making loud headlines. Her work has moved from training their own models to building complex Agentic Workflows, and lately into exploring Causality and AI for Innovation. She is interested in how AI can move beyond answering what we already know to helping us discover what we do not yet know.
Creating Micro Drama videos using Apertus, the Swiss Open Weights LLM
Independent authors struggle to reach younger audiences in the short-form video era, yet typical AI video generation remains a "prompt and pray" manual process. This session introduces ReelaTales, an agentic multimedia production pipeline that acts as an autonomous AI director to convert static manuscripts into cinematic, social-ready video trailers.
We will dive into the architecture of our orchestration fleet, detailing how we moved beyond third-party dependencies to leverage Apertus, the open-weights Swiss LLM, running on local infrastructure to handle semantic text analysis, emotional beat mapping, and cinematic shot choreography. Attendees will walk away with practical insights on chaining local foundation models with heavy video APIs to maintain strict narrative integrity and character consistency across automated production pipelines.
About the Speaker
Miguel Rodriguez is the creator of ReelaTales, an advanced agentic fleet framework designed for local multimodal media production. Passionate about local infrastructure and decentralized AI, his work focuses on bridging the gap between open-source foundation models and commercial applications in the creator economy. With over 30 years of software engineering experience in switzerland he has lately been AI-pilled working with all possible LLM's in the last few months.
Building Real-World Computer Vision Systems with Voxel51
This talk will explore practical workflows for building, evaluating, and improving modern computer vision systems. We'll dive into real-world approaches to dataset curation, model analysis, multimodal AI workflows, and production-ready vision pipelines using open-source technologies.
The session is designed for engineers, researchers, and AI practitioners looking to better understand how teams are developing and scaling computer vision applications today. Expect practical demos, technical insights, and discussions around the evolving AI tooling ecosystem.
About the Speaker
Harpreet Sahota is a hacker-in-residence and machine learning engineer with a passion for deep learning and generative AI. He's got a deep interest in RAG, Agents, and Multimodal AI.
Beyond the hype: deploying foundation models for enterprise visual inspection
Automated visual inspection represents a massive market opportunity with the profound potential to save lives. In this talk, I will highlight recent success stories driven by algorithmic advancements in foundation models for visual inspection. I will then explore two real-world use cases (medical diagnostics and civil infrastructure monitoring) that IBM Research has tackled over the past few years.
Finally, I will conclude by outlining the remaining open challenges in deploying these systems to inspire future work within the community.
About the Speaker
Niccolo Avogaro is a predoctoral researcher specializing in foundation models for dense image recognition. With a background in mechanical engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, his work focuses on advancing the capabilities of multimodal systems in complex visual environments.