Speaking 2025

ODSC West — Burlingame, CA

Speaking at ODSC West 2025, one of the largest data science and AI conferences on the West Coast.

AWS Generative AI Loft, London — London, UK

Presentation at AWS GenAI Loft London on Small Language Models (SLMs) and their role in agentic AI applications. Exploring how SLMs are emerging as indispensable tools for organizations with their unique blend of performance, cost-effectiveness, and resource efficiency in the future of AI and agentic applications.

AWS GenAI Day France - Tech Track — Paris, France

Tech track session at AWS GenAI Day France exploring practical techniques for using Small Language Models (SLMs) in enterprise settings. Presentation covered the limitations of proprietary models in terms of privacy, compliance, and cost, and explored modern workflows for adapting SLMs with domain-specific pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and alignment. Discussion included open-source tools and Arcee AI's approach to building cost-efficient, high-quality AI applications.

MCP Conference Berlin — Berlin, Germany

An in-depth exploration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its role in AI system development. This presentation examines the truth behind MCP, its capabilities, and how it's shaping the future of AI integration and data standardization.

Twitch — Online

Live streaming session on AWS Twitch channel discussing startup building strategies and AWS services for entrepreneurs.

Intel AI Innovators Across Industries Webinar — Online

Webinar presentation on Arcee Foundation Models (AFM)—a family of small, efficient language models delivering state-of-the-art AI quality on Intel Xeon CPUs. AFM provides comparable performance to much larger models while significantly lowering hosting costs and infrastructure complexity. Designed for enterprises that demand cost-efficiency, privacy, security, and regulatory compliance, AFM offers full transparency with open weights and architecture, eliminating vendor lock-in.

Arm Partner Summit — Cambridge, UK

Panel discussion on real-world applications of optimized models on Arm architecture, featuring collaboration with Meta, AWS, Arcee AI, AIZIP, and Stability. Exploring practical implementations and performance optimizations for AI models on Arm-based systems.

MCP Conference London

Europe's first developer conference dedicated to the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Presentation on building applications from scratch using open source tools and Small Language Models, exploring how MCP standardizes AI data integration and enables new possibilities for AI system development.

Paris AI, ML and Computer Vision Meetup

Practical session on using small open-source language models (SLMs) in enterprise settings. Exploring modern workflows for adapting SLMs with domain-specific pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and alignment. Introducing and demonstrating open-source tools such as DistillKit, Spectrum, and MergeKit, which implement advanced techniques crucial for achieving task-specific accuracy while optimizing computational costs. Also discussing models and solutions built by Arcee AI.

Budapest ML 2025 — Budapest, Hungary

This session focuses on practical techniques for using small open-source language models (SLMs) in enterprise settings. We first highlight the limitations of proprietary models in terms of privacy, compliance, and cost. Then, we explore modern workflows for adapting SLMs with domain-specific pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and alignment. Along the way, we will introduce and demonstrate open-source tools like DistillKit, Spectrum, and MergeKit, which implement advanced techniques that are critical in achieving task-specific accuracy while optimizing computational costs. We'll also discuss some of the models and enterprise solutions built by Arcee AI.

Cisco Live — San Diego, USA

Featured in the Intel Showcase (#3035) at Cisco Live 2025, the Edge IQ Retail Assistant demonstrates how AI can transform retail operations without relying on GPUs. Powered by Intel Xeon 6 CPUs running in a Cisco UCS server, this technical demonstrator showcases a chatbot interface powered by open-source small language models and real-time data analytics. Store associates can interact naturally through voice or text, receiving immediate information about product availability from Chooch's inventory system or crowd density from WaitTime's analytics platform. The solution runs three sophisticated small language models entirely on Intel Xeon processors using OpenVINO optimization, highlighting the capabilities of modern CPU-based AI inference for edge computing applications.

The World Bank, Washington DC

Presentation on AI and machine learning applications for public investment and development projects.

ODSC East — Boston, USA

Session focusing on practical techniques for using small open-source language models (SLMs) for real-life projects. Covers limitations of proprietary models in terms of privacy, compliance, and cost, then explores modern workflows for adapting SLMs with domain-specific pre-training, instruction fine-tuning, and alignment. Introduces and demonstrates open-source Arcee AI SLM, and libraries like DistillKit, Spectrum, and MergeKit, which are critical in achieving task-specific accuracy while optimizing computational costs. Discussion includes why SLMs are a great fit for advanced scenarios like model routing and agentic workflows.

AWS Summit Paris — Paris, France

Session GAI307 focusing on optimizing AI/ML workloads on Amazon EC2 and AWS Graviton. Presentation covers Small Language Models (SLMs), AWS Graviton 4 performance benefits, cost optimization strategies, and practical demonstrations of Arcee AI models running on Graviton instances. Discussion includes quantization techniques, performance comparisons, and enterprise AI deployment recommendations.

Europa-Park, Germany

Participation in CloudFest conference discussing cloud computing and AI technologies.

AWS AI and Data Conference Ireland 2025 — Lyrath Convention Centre, Kilkenny, Ireland

Knowledge distillation transfers capabilities from large language models to smaller, faster models while maintaining performance. Organizations can achieve dramatic improvements in throughput and cost efficiency. Learn how to implement distillation using Amazon Bedrock or to build a custom solution on Amazon SageMaker. Julien Simon will showcase how Arcee AI uses distillation to develop industry-leading small language models (SLMs) based on open architectures. He will also introduce the open-source DistillKit library and demonstrate several newly distilled SLMs from Arcee AI.

AWS EMEA Innovate Generative AI+Data Conference — Online

Generative AI promises to revolutionize industries, but its immense computational demands and escalating costs pose significant challenges. To overcome these hurdles, AWS designed and purpose built AI chips AWS Trainium and Inferentia. In this session, get a close look at the innovation across silicon, server, and datacenter and hear about how AWS customers built, deployed, and scaled foundation models across various products and services using AWS AI chips.

Bank of Italy, Rome — Rome, Italy

Workshop co-hosted by the BIS Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics and the Bank of Italy, focusing on generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential applications in central banking. The event emphasizes ongoing projects and exchange of experiences to foster in-house expertise and reduce reliance on external service providers. Topics include generative AI methods, cloud computing, open-source software for official statistics, data architectures, and addressing data privacy and security concerns in data-driven environments.

Online

Virtual participation in ODSC AI Builders Summit focusing on AI development and implementation.