Operational AI: Real-Time Analytics in Production (LA)

Description
AI demos are easy. Building AI systems that actually work in production - in real time, under pressure, with messy data and real users - is where things get interesting.

At this OSA Community meetup, engineers and practitioners will share how they’re building real-time analytics and AI systems at production scale: streaming pipelines, real-time databases, feature stores, event-driven architectures, and the open-source technologies making it all possible.

If you work on data infrastructure, AI applications, observability, streaming systems, or just like hearing how modern systems are really built, you’ll fit right in.
Food and drink are provided!

Speakers
Robert Hodges, CEO @ Altinity
Dmitri Pappa, Senior Solutions Engineer @ Grafana
Nick Acosta, Developer Advocate @ Collate

Agenda
6 pm - Networking
6:15 - 8:00 pm - Talks
8:00 - 9:00 pm - Networking

Description of the Talks
Is It Safe? Letting AI Touch Production Data Without The Tears
Speaker: Robert Hodges, CEO @ Altinity
Abstract: Let's talk about AI safety. On June 2nd our first support case arrived in which a user's AI agent deleted a production table. It's a moment we've long anticipated. This talk presents practical ways to give AI access to production data while avoiding the dangers. We'll focus on three specific problems: ensuring only authorized agents access data, preventing accidental loss, and keeping proprietary information out of hosted LLMs. The solutions range from here-and-now approaches like OAuth and MCP to long-range opportunities like local models. Letting AI agents range free over data is the dream. Let's do the engineering to make it real.
Speaker Bio: Robert Hodges serves as CEO at Altinity, an enterprise provider for ClickHouse®. Robert has over 30 years of experience with database systems and applications including pre-relational databases such as M204, online SQL transaction processing, Hadoop, and analytics.

AI Observability with Grafana
Speaker: Dmitri Pappa, Senior Solutions Engineer @ Grafana
Abstract: Join us for the latest from Grafana Labs, a leader in AI Observability. Grafana software helps over 35 million global users solve problems, monitoring everything from watering plants to critical IT infrastructure at the world’s largest companies.
In this session we will discuss our “actually useful” Grafana AI tools including:
Grafana Assistant - Accelerate dashboard creation, analytics and troubleshooting
AI Observability - Expand visibility into 3rd party agents, conversations, tools and tokens
Assistant Investigations - Leverage a fleet of specialized agents for rapid root cause analysis
Speaker Bio: Dmitri spent his career automating software at HPE and IBM. He has spent the last few years helping Grafana customers mature their Observability practices, now leveraging AI tools.

Building Better Agent-Driven Analytics with Open Source and Open Standards
Speaker: Nick Acosta, Developer Advocate, Collate
Abstract: AI has transformed software engineering. With code living inside a designed context system where files have structure, dependencies are explicit, and repositories make every change reviewable, agent-driven code is now easy, but using that same model that is rewriting the world's codebase for analytics finds it leveraging tools that share no data model, grasping at definitions that drift, and traversing lineage that breaks down across an ever-growing data stack. This talk covers what Anthropic and OpenAI are building internally to address their own semantic and context issues, and what a similar solution might look like for you in open-source by introducing OpenMetadata, an open Semantic Context Graph connecting tables, lineage, glossary terms, and governance into one machine-readable layer.
Speaker Bio: Nick moved to Los Angeles in 2018 and has worked as a Developer Advocate for open-source data projects ever since, including positions at IBM, Fivetran, and now Collate, who are building OpenMetadata: the #1 open context layer for humans, AI assistants, and agents.

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