Hello everyone! As always a big thank you to all who attended our first Data & AI London meet up of the year in March.. Of course a big thank you to Katia Gil Guzman of OpenAI too for taking the time to join us and kick off the year of meet ups perfectly!
Now its time to keep things rolling and announce our next event for May! For this event we welcome back one of the fan favourites Holly Smith from Databricks who gave an awesome talk last year and Emma Burrows Cofounder of PortiaAI, an open source framework that allows developers to spin up AI agents.
Emma Burrows | CTO / CoFounder @ PortiaAI
Architecting multi agent systems for reliability
2025 is purportedly the year of Agents, autonomous systems able to accomplish a vast swathe of tasks which were previously unheard of for AI. At the same time, many naysayers are citing difficulties in running agents in production due to reliability concerns. In this talk, we'll look at some of the difficulties in creating these systems, and what the trends are in the industry that address them, as well as our own experience building these systems at Portia AI.
About me
Emma Burrows is CTO and co-founder of Portia AI, a multi agent SDK focused on reliability and authentication. Prior to Portia, she was CTO for Stripe UK, and has held leadership and advisory roles at Google and a number of early stage startups.
Holly Smith | Staff Developer Advocate @ Databricks
The Metadata Marathon: How Three Storage Projects are Racing Forward
With the enormous amount of discussion about open storage formats between nerds and even not-nerds, it can be hard to keep track of who’s doing what and how this actually makes any impact on day to day data projects.
I want us to take a closer look at the three big projects in this space; Delta, Hudi and Iceberg. They’re all trying to solve for similar data problems and have tackled the various challenges in different ways. This talk with start with the very basics of how we got here, what the history is before diving deep into the underlying tech, their roadmaps and their impacts on the data landscape as a whole.
About me
Holly Smith is a multi award winning Data and AI expert who has over a decade of experience working with Data and AI teams in a variety of capacities from individual contributors all the way up to leadership. In her role at Databricks she has worked with many multi national companies as they embark on their journey to the cutting edge of data. She is a renowned public speaker, teacher and minority in tech advocate.
Please aim to arrive at 6pm. The talks will start around 6.30pm (give or take a few mins) and there will be pizza and refreshments as always on arrival :)
Look forward to seeing you all soon!
