5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC)

REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS EVENT ARE NOW CLOSED London Reactor Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Hi Everyone, it is with great pleasure we announce the return of the London Reactor Meetup at our NEW location in the Microsoft Paddington office. This event will be AI focused and we have some amazing speakers lined up and ready to share their insights and expertise with you. The new location address is: Paddington Central 2 Kingdom St London W2 6BD IMPORTANT: Please do NOT turn up to our old location as this is now closed and you will be sorely missed. This is a great opportunity for you to connect with community leaders, developers and Microsoft MVP’s so come along and let’s have some fun! Please note – Entry is on first come first serve basis so please RSVP & Arrive early to join in! 6:00PM - Doors Open (we will welcome you in the building lobby) 6:30PM - 6:35PM - Welcome by Liam Hampton , Sr. Cloud Advocate & Ravneet Khokhar, Reactor PM 6:35PM - 7:15PM - Nikhil Sehgal, AI Engineer & CEO/Founder of Vastmindz - Utilising AI agents to Teach LLMs, such as Azure OpenAI's GPT-family, to Interact & Take Actions in the Real-world 7:15PM - 7:30PM - Break (food 🍕) 7:30PM - 8:00PM – Amy Boyd, Principal Cloud Advocate, Microsoft, AI without Data is like Bonny without Clyde Session 1: Utilising AI agents to Teach LLMs, such as Azure OpenAI's GPT-family, to Interact & Take Actions in the Real-world by Nikhil Sehgal The main goal of this session is to delve deep into the intricacies of using AI agents to train LLMs (like the GPT-family hosted on Azure OpenAI) to not just respond to queries, but to interact with real-world environments and execute tasks seamlessly. For example, AI agents can go and execute tasks autonomously for regular IT support queries or sales queries. Businesses will eventually be able to "hire" these AI agents to fulfil an entire workflow. The space of AI agents is still very early, although it is arguably going to be one of the most impactful applications of AI. Session 2: AI without Data is like Bonny without Clyde by Amy Boyd In this session the core message is, don't forget about your data. AI is taking another huge leap in its journey, allowing us to be more efficient and productive in everything we do - its really exciting times! But AI workloads without data considerations could leave you in a difficult position. Lets chat about: Preparing your data platform to enable building amazing AI applications Bringing cutting edge models into the Microsoft Fabric experience How has responsible AI moved on in the age of Generative AI? REGISTRATIONS FOR THIS EVENT ARE NOW CLOSED

6:30 PM - 9:00 PM (UTC)

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please). DevOps meets AI DevOps is inherently a cultural shift with a mass of technologies involved at many stages of the lifecycle. Over the past year we have seen a huge change in the AI sector and this developers, entrepreneurs and businesses are all stating to adopt this technology and make it a part of their everyday development. With this being the case, the DevOps lifecycle is going to pivot and change for everyone in one way or another so lets dive into how this is happening! Agenda 6:30PM – 6:40PM: Welcome by Liam Hampton, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft 6:40PM – 7:00PM: GitHub Copilot throughout the development lifecycle, Chris Reddington, Senior Manager, Developer Advocacy at GitHub 7:00PM – 7:20PM: LLMOps - Building Skills for the AI World, Aravind Putrevu, Dev GTM Advisor at SurrealDB 7:20PM – 7:50PM: Break 7:50PM – 8:15PM: TBC Session Descriptions GitHub Copilot throughout the development lifeycle With decreasing budgets, growing backlogs, increasing responsibility and complexity, ensuring our engineering teams have a great development experience has never been more important. Join Chris, as he shows how GitHub Copilot can support you throughout your development lifecycle. LLMOps - Building Skills for the AI World We have all been through the DevOps wave that affected many platforms and technology. With Generative AI, most of the built workflows, automation and experiences are being revolutionised. Aravind will unravel the intricate relationship between LLMOps and traditional DevOps, highlighting the revolutionary impact of AI-enabled experiences on various aspects of DevOps including Observability (with a focus on the context of Logs, Metrics, and Traces in LLMs), FinOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Security.

6:00 PM - 9:00 PM (UTC)

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please). Agenda 6:00 PM - Arrivals: Registration and welcoming of guests 6:30 PM - 6:40 PM - Welcome Address by Liam Hampton, Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft 6:40 PM - 7:15 PM - Build Custom Copilots for Teams with the new AI library and Teams Toolkit by Ayça Baş, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft Joey Glocke, Principal PM Manager - Teams Conversational Platform Sid Uppal, Principal Group Engineering Manager - Teams Conversational Platform 7:15 PM - 7:45 PM - Break 7:45 PM - 8:20 PM -Managing your AI (and other) APIs with Microsoft API Management service by Johan Myburgh, Technical Trainer at Microsoft 8:20 PM - 8:45 PM - Networking & Closing Session Descriptions Build Custom Copilots for Teams with the new AI library and Teams Toolkit The new Microsoft Teams AI library simplifies the integration of Large Language Models (LLM) into Teams applications, enabling you to build intelligent, conversational apps in the flow of work of your users. Learn how to build conversational apps with Teams Toolkit and explore the full range of capabilities of the AI library to help you build AI-powered apps easily, responsibly, and providing a consistent natural language user experience. Reimagine a new era of intelligent apps in Teams. Managing your AI (and other) APIs with Microsoft API Management service Microsoft's AI services are normally exposed via HTTPS endpoints and are secured by set of keys that need to be stored and managed. But how can you manage those endpoints and keys at scale? Enter Azure API Management (APIM) which wraps your APIs and gives you complete control over these requests by applying authentication, authorization, logging, throttling to requests.

5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC)

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please). Agenda 6:00 PM - Arrivals: Registration and welcoming of guests 6:30 PM - 6:40 PM - Welcome Address 6:40 PM - 7:00 PM - Understanding AI: build your own enterprise ChatGPT with LangChain4J by Sandra Ahlgrimm and Yohan Lahorsa 7:00 PM - 7:30 PM - Break 7:30 PM – 7:50 PM - Deploying a Python Web App with Azure by Marlene Mhangami 7:50 PM - 8:10 PM - Accelerating Development: Harnessing Service Bus and Azure Functions for Event-Driven Solutions by Chandan Bhagat 8:10 PM - 8:45 PM - Networking / Questions & Closing Session Descriptions: Understanding AI: build your own enterprise ChatGPT with LangChain4J In this session we will build a chatbot from based on OpenAI models and implementing the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern. Using a reference document database, the model will be able to answer questions in natural language and generate complete, sourced responses from your documents. To do this, we will create a Quarkus service based on the open-source LangChain4J framework and a website to test our chatbot. Accelerating Development: Harnessing Service Bus and Azure Functions for Event-Driven Solutions In this session, dive into the world of event-driven development with Service Bus and Azure Functions. Discover how to leverage these powerful Azure services to create robust, scalable, and responsive applications that react to events in real-time. We'll start by exploring the fundamentals of event-driven architecture and how it enables loosely coupled and highly scalable systems. You'll learn how Service Bus acts as the backbone of event communication, allowing seamless publishing and consuming of events across your application. Next, we'll delve into Azure Functions and understand how they can be used to process events triggered by Service Bus. We'll walk through real-world scenarios and explore best practices for designing and implementing event-driven solutions using Azure Functions. Throughout the session, you'll gain practical insights and tips for designing resilient architectures, handling message processing, and optimizing performance. Whether you're building microservices, IoT applications, or real-time analytics pipelines, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to accelerate your development with event-driven architecture on Azure.

5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC)

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please). Agenda 6:00 PM - Arrivals: Registration and welcoming of guests 6:30 PM - 6:40 PM - Welcome Address 6:40 PM - 7:00 PM - Use an LLM on the tube with offline AI by Jim Bennett 7:10 PM - 7:40 PM - Lessons from setting up RAG systems in production to search over internal data and automate customer support by Victor Naroditskiy 7:40PM - Closing, snacks & networking Session Descriptions Use an LLM on the tube with offline We've all got used to using LLMs in our developer workflow - from asking ChatGPT what tools and libraries to use, to getting GitHub copilot to generate code for us. Great when you are online, but not so useful when you are offline, like on the tube or in a plane with no WiFi. But what if there was another way? In this session, Jim will introduce offline LLMs. We'll look at how you can run LLMs locally, such as Phi-2 from Microsoft, and add these to your developer workflow. We'll compare the performance of offline vs online, both the speed and quality, but also touch on privacy and other considerations. We'll also look at hardware requirements as we don't all have the latest GPUs to hand. Lessons from setting up RAG systems in production to search over internal data and automate customer support Everyone has been crazy about Gen AI lately and yet few companies can say they derive measurable business value from Gen AI based solutions. I will go over two use cases and the journey to get them from an out-of-the-box RAG pipeline that kinda works in a demo to production quality systems that create value. The first use case is search over technical content such as documentation and developer forums. The second use case is automating ticket-based customer support.

5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC)

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please). Agenda 6:00 PM - Arrivals: Registration and welcoming of guests 6:30 PM - 6:40 PM - Welcome Address 6:40 PM - 7:00 PM - How to leverage AI securely by Rafah Knight, CEO at SecureAI 7:10 PM - 7:40 PM - Upgrade your security game, move from API keys to managed identity on Azure by Chris Noring, Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft 7:40 PM - 8:15 - Refreshments & Networking 8:15 PM - Closing Session Descriptions How to leverage AI securely This talk explores key cybersecurity concerns associated with AI adoption and steps organisations can take to mitigate them. Together we will look at AI security use cases and examine the NIST AI RMF & NIST CSF to understand how security professionals can leverage best practices to manage AI security risk. Upgrade your security game, move from API keys to managed identity on Azure Using API keys? Then listen up! Many times API keys is the easy choice but they also constitute a risk. Learn how to mitigate this risk by using managed identity on Azure. But what even is managed identity? Let's explain this new concept and look at a practical example.

6:00 PM - 9:00 PM (UTC)

About London Reactor Meetup Microsoft Reactor London Meetups are a community of like-minded engineers, developers, professionals and students, allowing you to connect with people, skills, and technology to enhance your career or personal learning. Our regular meetups are an opportunity to hear from leaders in the industry about challenges, tooling and best practices. If you are interested in speaking or want to suggest a talk you’ve heard before, please do let us know (no vendor / recruitment / sales pitches please). Agenda 6:00 PM - Arrivals: Registration and welcoming of guests 6:30 PM - 6:40 PM - Welcome by Liam Hampton 6:40 PM - 7:00 PM - Ignite Wrap Up by Liam Hampton 7:00 PM - 7:20 PM - Securing the AI Revolution: A Two-Year Check-Up by Michael Man 7:20 PM - 7:45 PM - Refreshments & Networking 7:45 PM - 8:05 PM - Generative AI in Action: Building GitHub Copilot code review by Tim Rogers 8:05 PM - 8:30 PM - Closing & Networking Session Descriptions Securing the AI Revolution: A Two-Year Check-Up Two years ago, ChatGPT ignited a global AI revolution, transforming the landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) at an unprecedented pace. In this talk, I’ll share insights from my journey through this dynamic era of GenAI, focusing on critical security considerations and emerging security trends that will shape the future of AI. Generative AI in Action: Building GitHub Copilot code review Large language models unlock exciting new opportunities - but there's still lots of hard work to do for engineers, designers and product managers to turn foundation models into products users love! In this session, you'll learn about GitHub's journey building Copilot code review, currently in public preview, and the lessons learned along the way.