Dear data-loving community, we’re excited to invite you to our next Meetup! This time in collaboration with [Spiced Academy](https://www.spiced-academy.com/en), who will be hosting us at their space.

Join us on April 23 in Berlin and bring all your questions! :)

Tom Kaltofen: "Building Deterministic Context Layers for AI Agents"***

[Tom Kaltofen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkaltofen/) is an Engineer at [DHL Data & AI](https://www.linkedin.com/company/dhl-data-ai/) and a Creator at [mloda.ai.](http://mloda.ai.)

About his keynote:

"Data access and reuse are still unsolved, and AI agents are making it worse. This talk goes deeper into that problem: AI agents depend on reliable context (data, features, intermediate state) to make correct decisions. In practice, this context is tied to specific pipelines or infrastructure, leading to brittle systems when moving from prototype to production.

I'll show how a plugin-based approach lets teams build deterministic context layers: separating what you compute from how you compute it, so the same feature definitions work on a laptop and in production.

The talk includes a live demo where an AI agent discovers and queries data features programmatically. "

Behnaz Derakhshani: "What If I Started Today? Rethinking Career Switching in the AI Era"***

[Behnaz Derakhshani](https://www.linkedin.com/in/behnaz-derakhshani-63342775/) works as a Data Engineer at [Diconium](https://diconium.com). She shares her personal career shift from finance to data engineering, including the unfiltered challenges and lessons along the way.

About her keynote:

"Eight years ago, there was no AI to debug my logic, just documentation and Stack Overflow. Now as a Data Engineer, I’m breaking down the lessons learned from my finance to tech transition and why AI makes this the most exciting (and accessible) time to pivot."

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What to expect:

• Two expert talks and Q&A
• A welcoming atmosphere with networking opportunities
• Some snacks & drinks to fuel your thoughts :)

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Timetable:

• 18:30 - Event admission
• 18:50 - Welcome & Introduction
• 19:00 - Tom Kaltofen: "Building Deterministic Context Layers for AI Agents"
• 19:30 - 5 minutes break
• 19:35 - Behnaz Derakhshani: "What If I Started Today? Rethinking Career Switching in the AI Era"
• 20:05 - Snacks, Drinks & Networking
• 21:30 - End

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More on the -> [applydata data engineering meetup page](https://applydata.io/data-engineering-meetup/).

Our goal is to form a local data-loving community, so join us and let's talk data together!

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At the event, sound, image and video recordings are created and published for documentation purposes as well as for the presentation of the event in publicly accessible media, on websites and blogs and for presentation on social media. By participating the event, the participant implicitly consents to the aforementioned photo and/or video recordings. Find [more information on data protection here](https://applydata.io/events/information-on-data-protection/).