Global AI and Data Science

FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) is a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the use of  open source software. FOSDEM usually takes place in Brussels (Belgium).  The 2025 edition features 1143 speakers, 1090 events, and 79 tracks and you can see the schedule here. If you aren't in Brussels, you can watch the live streams from the main tracks and developer rooms such as the "Low Level AI Engineering & Hacking" Dev Room. There is a track on AI and there are Lightning Talks too. 

Speakers from Red Hat and IBM at FOSDEM include:

• Sun 14:25-14:40 - Maximilien Philippe Marie de Bayser - LLM Tool use in vLLM

• Sun 11:50-11:55 - Olivia Buzek - Building Your (Local) LLM Second Brain 

• Sun 14:10-14:25 - Carol Chen - Synthetic Data: The Secret Ingredient in Better Language Models
  

• Sun 13:20-13:40 - Cedric Clyburn - Building AI Applications from your desktop with Podman AI Lab

• Sun 14:10-14:25 - Cedric Clyburn - Synthetic Data: The Secret Ingredient in Better Language Models

• Sun 12:10-12:15 - Martin Hickey - Building AI Applications on Kubernetes: Leveraging Instructlab and the Bee Agent Framework

• Sun 12:05-12:10 - Arnaud Le Hors - Model Openess Framework  

• Sun 12:00-12:05 - Joe Olson - Data Prep Kit: Open Source Data Engineering for LLMs
  

• Sun 12:10-12:15 - Paul Schweigert -  Building AI Applications on Kubernetes: Leveraging Instructlab and the Bee Agent Framework

Fosdem Fringe (right after FOSDEM)

• AI Plumbers in Ghent on February 3 at 10am, Trevor Grant is presenting Chain of Thought Reasoning and Other LLM Tricks.
• CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent where, on February 4 at 2:50pm, JJ Asghar is speaking about Open Source AI and InstructLab and on February 5 at 1:00pm Carol Chen  will conduct an InstructLab workshop.

Note all times are Central Europe