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Adam H Phillips
Founder & Managing Partner
AthletesInnovate Ventures
SESSION DETAILS
Can vibe-coding produce a viable MVP? - Getting through the startup phase in the AI-enabled coding world
In the new AI-enabled coding environment, vibe-coding is both an enticing and often-misunderstood reality. Let's spend some time with startup experts who have evaluated hundreds of MVPs and coders who can help sort fact from fiction, and position vibe-coding to be a resource for both technical and non-technical founders.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Adam H Phillips is the Founder and Managing Director of AthletesInnovate, a lawyer and a former Managing Director at Techstars in the Washington DC metro region. He primarily invests in early-stage businesses and startups, but also works with athletes and others interested in starting and running and using entrepreneurship to change their lives and neighborhoods. Adam is also the Co-founder and former Founding Managing Director at MoxE Venture Partners, and a former Senior Attorney and Director of Innovation at USDOT but he still thinks of being a basketball coach to 7th graders as the best job he ever had. Adam is also a Board Member at Owners in Honor, a non-profit committed to bringing the benefits of entrepreneurship through acquisition to the veteran community. He holds a Bachelor's (Psychology), a Master's (History) and Juris Doctorate."Entrepreneurship isn’t a straight path; it’s about resilience, adaptability, and learning from failure. Anyone who has faced challenges and learned to make tough decisions can excel at it however, since the technical parts of running a business can be taught, but grit and perseverance can’t."
Clinton Teegarden
Distinguished Engineer
Capital One
SESSION DETAILS
Think AI Agents Are Only for Python? Think Again
The explosion in agentic AI frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, and CrewAI has unlocked incredible possibilities for automating complex tasks. However, this revolution has been overwhelmingly centered in the Python ecosystem, leaving a massive community of skilled mobile, backend, and JVM developers on the side-lines or forcing them into a language they don't use daily. This session introduces Koog by JetBrains, a powerful framework that brings agentic AI development to Kotlin. We will explore how developers can build sophisticated, multi-agent solutions without writing a single line of Python. We'll directly compare Koog's architecture and capabilities for creating agentic workflows against its popular Python counterparts, highlighting the similarities in power and the differences in approach. The true power of this stack lies in its deployability. We will demonstrate how, by leveraging Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), you can write your AI agent logic once and seamlessly integrate it anywhere: as a backend service with Ktor, directly within an Android app, or even in the browser with Kotlin/JS. Attendees will leave this talk with a clear understanding of how to build their own AI agents using the tools they already know, ready to integrate intelligent solutions across their entire stack.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Distinguished Engineer at Capital One with a focus on core platforms and developer experience.
Vaishnavi Gudur
Software Engineer
Microsoft
SESSION DETAILS
Agentic AI Under Siege: Verifiable Safety Envelopes for Micro-LLMs and MCP
Agentic AI is racing into prod—often without a safety envelope. This session shows how to ship micro-LLMs and MCP-based agents that are actually verifiable: zero-trust boundaries, policy-as-code guardrails, signed tool invocations, prompt-injection defenses, evaluation harnesses, and audit-ready provenance. We’ll dissect the top failure modes (unsafe tool use, data exfil via prompts, RAG leakage, jailbreaks) and map them to concrete countermeasures: least-privilege tool adapters, contract tests for tools, adversarial evals in CI, and immutable event logs for post-mortems. Expect a gritty, pattern-driven discussion: reference architectures, checklists, and “red team to fix” playbooks that teams can lift on Monday. If you care about regulated stacks or multi-tenant safety, this panel is your north star for provable agent safety.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Vaishnavi Gudur is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, where she architects secure and scalable systems that safeguard more than 145 million Microsoft Teams users worldwide. Her work focuses on phishing protection, compliance, and AI-driven security, blending deep technical expertise with a commitment to responsible innovation. Beyond her engineering role, Vaishnavi is an active researcher and thought leader in AI governance and ethical AI. She has published on topics including privacy-sensitive smart contracts, zero-day cyber threat detection, and trustworthy AI architectures.As a recognized voice in the field, Vaishnavi has delivered invited talks at leading industry and academic forums, including SecurityWeek’s AI Risk Summit, IEEE Cloud Computing Symposium, and CodeSecCon, where she highlights the real-world risks of deploying AI in enterprise environments and offers practical frameworks for building resilient, ethical systems. She also serves as a peer reviewer for IEEE and as a lead editor with Springer Nature, helping shape the next generation of scholarship in AI ethics and cybersecurity. Passionate about bridging research, engineering, and governance, Vaishnavi is building a global platform to advance safe, transparent, and human-centered AI adoption at scale.
Shilpa Shastri
Principal Product Manager
IBM
SESSION DETAILS
Beyond Dashboards: AI Agents for Intelligent Cloud Costs and Usage
Abstract: Cloud costs are spiraling out of control for most organizations, with poor visibility, inconsistent tagging, and manual optimization processes leaving money on the table every month. This talk introduces a new paradigm: autonomous AI agents that continuously monitor, analyze, and optimize your cloud spending
What You'll Learn: Discover how to build and deploy AI agents that transform cloud cost management from a reactive, manual process into a proactive, intelligent system. We'll explore real-world implementations of agents that automatically unify data across multiple cloud providers, standardize resource tagging, create cost-to-business mappings, and execute optimization recommendations—all while learning from your organization's unique patterns and constraints.
Key Takeaways: Architecture patterns for building cloud cost management AI agents. Data unification strategies across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments Automated tagging and resource categorization using ML techniques. Real-time rightsizing algorithms that balance performance and cost. Implementation of guardrails and approval workflows for autonomous actions. ROI metrics and success stories from production deployments
Target Audience: DevOps engineers, cloud architects, platform engineers, and engineering leaders looking to reduce cloud costs while maintaining system reliability and developer productivity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Shilpa Shastri is a Principal Product Manager at Apptio (an IBM company), where she owns data strategy and shipping of GenAI features. Previously, she held product roles at AWS and Microsoft, where she shipped cloud services, infrastructure and developer platforms. Her work bridges product strategy, cloud economics, and AI innovation—helping enterprises adopt AI responsibly and at scale. Shilpa speaks frequently on AI, its adoption, infrastructure optimization, and the future of agentic AI.
Dr. Michelle Lee
Chief Technology Officer
ITHAKA
SESSION DETAILS
From Search to Conversation: Building Trustworthy GenAI Research Assistants with RAG and Automated Evaluation
We turned academic search into a conversation by designing, building, and deploying a production GenAI Research Assistant that lets students, professors, and researchers ask natural questions about the papers they find and receive grounded answers, summaries, and related content. This talk walks through the full lifecycle from domain grounding and corpus preparation to retrieval augmented generation, LLM selection and adaptation, and prompt plus context strategies that reduce hallucinations while preserving a great user experience. We will cover the architecture behind scalable pipelines, hybrid use of embeddings and multiple models, why and when we combine providers, and the practical trade-offs among cost, latency, and accuracy. Because trust is essential in scholarly workflows, we will dive into privacy and governance for sensitive content, human in the loop review, and the telemetry that drives iterative quality gains and adoption. Finally, we will share our automated evaluation framework that blends overlap and semantic metrics with groundedness checks and rubric based judging, including Databricks MLFlow, and LLM-as-a-judge, to ensure faithful, high quality results. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns for designing, evaluating, and operating GenAI applications at scale in real production environments.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Michelle Lee is the CTO of ITHAKA, the nonprofit EdTech organization behind JSTOR, where she leads digital transformation and AI/ML innovation. She has launched award-winning GenAI products and previously held senior technology leadership roles at Bloomberg Industry Group, The College Board, and GeoEye (now Maxar).
Josh Gordon
Head of AI Developer Relations
Google
SESSION DETAILS
Build Your First AI Agent in Under an Hour
Tired of AI agent theory? Ready to actually build something? In this interactive session, we'll forget the slides and jump straight into the code. For one hour, you're not an attendee, you're an AI architect. I'll guide you through a rapid prototyping sprint using the powerful MCP framework and ADK Toolkit. You will learn by doing, and you will succeed. What You'll Walk Away With: A repeatable blueprint for prototyping AI agents. A working agent, built by you, ready to be customized. The confidence to turn your own AI ideas into reality. This isn't a lecture. It's a launchpad. Let's build.
Prerequisites: None! This session is beginner-friendly. All you need to bring is your curiosity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
I lead AI Developer Relations at Google. I have over 15 years of experience across classical, deep, and generative AI, and applications across many fields. I'm also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where I occasionally teach deep learning. I wear many hats at Google, and have engineering, management, and leadership experience.
Prof Mary (Missy) Cummings
Director
Mason Autonomy & Robotics Center
SESSION DETAILS
Build Your First AI Agent in Under an Hour
Tired of AI agent theory? Ready to actually build something? In this interactive session, we'll forget the slides and jump straight into the code. For one hour, you're not an attendee, you're an AI architect. I'll guide you through a rapid prototyping sprint using the powerful MCP framework and ADK Toolkit. You will learn by doing, and you will succeed. What You'll Walk Away With: A repeatable blueprint for prototyping AI agents. A working agent, built by you, ready to be customized. The confidence to turn your own AI ideas into reality. This isn't a lecture. It's a launchpad. Let's build.
Prerequisites: None! This session is beginner-friendly. All you need to bring is your curiosity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is a Professor in the George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing and directs the Mason Responsible AI program as well as the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC). She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the Virginia Academy for Science, Engineering and Mathematics. Her research interests include the application of artificial intelligence in safety-critical systems, assured autonomy, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.
Sujata Sridharan
Senior Software Engineer
Bolt
SESSION DETAILS
Outsmarting the AI: Building Fair and Responsible Prompts
AI tools are powerful, but they’re not always fair. They can amplify bias, produce fragile outputs, and mislead us with confident but incorrect answers. In this session, we’ll explore how developers can outsmart the AI by designing prompts that reveal these blind spots and by building safeguards into their workflows.Through real-world demos and interactive examples, we’ll see how small prompt changes create drastically different results and examine what this teaches us about bias, responsibility, and trust. You’ll walk away with practical strategies to design AI applications that are not just clever, but fair, transparent, and resilient.Whether you’re experimenting with Google’s AI tools for the first time or already building advanced workflows, this session will give you frameworks and inspiration to approach AI development more thoughtfully.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sujata Sridharan is a Senior Software Engineer at Bolt, where she builds large-scale backend systems and AI-driven commerce experiences. She has over a decade of engineering experience at companies including Microsoft and Amazon, with a focus on secure, reliable, and user-centric technology. Sujata is also an active mentor and hackathon judge, passionate about advancing responsible AI and equitable technology practices. At DevFest DC, she will share strategies for building fair and responsible AI systems, from prompts to broader design choices, that empower developers to outsmart AI.
Hadar Gev
CTO & Co-Founder
Myop
SESSION DETAILS
The No Frills Frontend Migration Survival Guide
Migrating a large front-end application, say, moving from AngularJS to React can feel overwhelming at first. It’s easy to think of it as a huge “all-or-nothing” rewrite. But in reality, a gradual migration, done one piece at a time, is not only possible, it's actually the smarter way to go.In this workshop, we'll walk you through what it really takes to pull off a migration like this without disrupting your team or your product. We’ll look at some of the common challenges you’ll run into like dealing with two different routing systems, keeping state consistent across frameworks, and managing bundle size when both frameworks need to live side by side for a while.We'll wrap up by getting hands-on with practical strategies that have worked well in real-world projects, including patterns like the Strangler Fig. The goal is to provide a realistic and replicable path forward so you can modernize your app, reduce tech debt, and end up with a cleaner, more maintainable codebase all without grinding your velocity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Experienced tech leader with 15+ years in software development, team management, and product strategy. Passionate about driving innovation and delivering scalable, high-quality solutions. Currently serving as CTO at a stealth startup, leading technical direction and product development. Always excited to connect and collaborate with fellow professionals.
Madona Wambua
Principal Software Engineer
Capital One
SESSION DETAILS
Demystify KMP builds and structure
This talk demystifies Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) project configuration for sharing business logic. Building mobile apps can be complex, and KMP can add another layer of complexity to an already challenging Gradle build setup. We'll dive deep into distributing shared code to iOS developers, and provide tips for making your KMP builds understandable, shareable, and fast.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
With over a decade of experience in software engineering, I specialize in building scalable mobile solutions and leading high-performing engineering teams. As a Google Developer Expert for Android, Author, Principal Software Engineer, and Executive MBA candidate at Cornell University, I bring a unique blend of technical depth, leadership, and business strategy. My work bridges innovation, mentorship, and impact at both organizational and community levels.
Brady Cusack
Co-Founder
Shannon AI
SESSION DETAILS
AI Extortion - How Hackers Steal Your Voice
In the movie Taken, what if Liam Neeson was contacted by AI instead of his Daughter? With new innovations in AI, it’s now possible to replicate the voice of loved ones and influential figures with minimal sample data sets. Combined with the fact that most people have been in at least 1 recorded zoom meeting, this is a ticking time bomb that is soon to ignite. This session will explore real world scenarios where AI impersonated individuals so clearly that relatives panicked and fell victim to extortion scams. We will look at some examples of this happening in the past, tools used to do this, and discuss how blockchain technology can be used to help defend against these types of attacks.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Brady Cusack is a founder of Shannon Cyber, a company building AI- and blockchain-powered systems and secure end-to-end encrypted communication tools for government agencies and private entities. At Shannon Cyber, Brady drives the vision, strategy, and technical innovation to ensure government integrity, creating systems that empower employees to safely report malpractice and promote accountability.In addition to leading Shannon Cyber, Brady serves as AVP, Technical Architect at Citizens, where he maintains automation infrastructure and enhances RPA capabilities across hundreds of processes. His expertise spans AI, startups, enterprise architecture, and cybersecurity, including co-founding Rematic Tokens and WorkAway IT, as well as senior engineering roles in automation and cybersecurity platforms.
Andrew Liu
Senior Software Engineer
Google
SESSION DETAILS
Redirecting the Trackers: Anatomy of Navigational Tracking Mitigations within the Chromium Browser
As third-party cookie blocking within the browser becomes widespread, cross-site tracking techniques have adapted in kind. Many malicious actors now rely on navigational tracking, turning a simple link click into a momentary redirect covertly exfiltrates user data. This talk provides a technical breakdown of modern navigational tracking techniques, such as bounce tracking and link decoration. We will then cover how mitigations were designed, standardized, and ultimately shipped in Chromium to address these issues, offering a look into how modern browsers are working to protect user privacy on the web.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Liu is a senior software engineer at Google, where he works on the Privacy Sandbox and Chrome Counter-Abuse. He has had a diverse career in both big tech and startups, focusing on the intersection of security and infrastructure. He previously worked on Google's Cloud Security and Authentication teams, was at Dropbox before its IPO, and served as an early employee of Scale AI, where he founded the company's ML infrastructure team. Throughout his career, Andrew has been a frequent contributor to major open source projects, including Chromium and Breakpad. He was also the former maintainer of Google Authenticator for Android and facilitated the open source release of the project in 2019.
Vrinda Bhatia
Senior Software Engineer
Block
SESSION DETAILS
Outsmarting the AI: Building Fair and Responsible Prompts
AI can be a brilliant aid but also hilariously wrong. In this interactive session, we’ll put AI through a set of real-world (and slightly quirky) prompts to see where it shines and where bias sneaks in. From unexpected stereotypes to fragile logic, you’ll see why even “smart” systems still need careful guidance. Together, we’ll unpack what went wrong, design better prompts, and talk about how developers can keep AI playful and responsible. You’ll leave with a few practical tricks for spotting bias, improving outputs, and building AI that’s not just powerful but fair and fun to use.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Vrinda Bhatia is a seasoned software engineer and AI builder with over 9 years of experience in companies like AWS and Block. Most recently, she is working as an ML Engineer at Block on the ML Inference platform, which has helped prevent over $220M in fraud losses in 2024. Previously, she was part of AWS AppStream, a secure application streaming service that played a pivotal role during the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting organizations such as the Washington State Pandemic Center and Los Angeles County in transitioning thousands of students and employees to secure remote environments.Beyond her professional work, Vrinda actively contributes to the open-source community, mentors aspiring technologists, and serves as a hackathon judge, supporting nonprofits like OHack.
Will Angel
AI Engineer
Excella
SESSION DETAILS
Integrating AI: MCP without the Hype
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol specifying how to provide context to AI models released by Anthropic in 2024 that has become a leading method for integrating tools and information with AI services like ChatGPT, and Claude. This talk will cover the basics of MCP, explore the benefits, risks, and costs of the protocol and ecosystem, and demonstrate building a custom connector to integrate meaningful data with an AI service before finishing with the two biggest challenges facing MCP (and AI integration in general): permissions and security.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Author of Virtual Power (New Degree Press, 2020), Data Enthusiast, co-organizer for the Data Visualization DC Meetup Group.
Kolton Andrus
CEO
Gremlin Inc.
SESSION DETAILS
Reliability Intelligence
Presentation will be around Reliability in the era of AI.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
CEO and Founder of Gremlin, the world's first Reliability Management product helping companies avoid outages and build more resilient systems.
Lior Hacohen
Founder & CEO
Hucheck Security
SESSION DETAILS
Compliance by Design: Early Implementation to Scale from Day One
This session will provide technical teams with practical guidance on embedding compliance into system architecture and development workflows from the outset. Rather than treating compliance as a late-stage hurdle, we’ll explore how early design decisions (such as access controls, audit logging, integration management, and documentation) can significantly streamline future certification processes, reduce costly rework, and support scalable growth. Attendees will gain actionable insights to build systems that are audit-ready by design, enabling faster time to market, stronger customer trust, and long-term operational efficiency.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
CEO and Founder of Hucheck Security.
Adalbert De La Cruz
Founder
Clarity
SESSION DETAILS
Vibe Code 101: Product Manager Approach
Vibe Code 101 is an immersive workshop designed to introduce participants to the innovative world of Vibe Coding — a method that combines AI-powered tools with intuitive no-code development. Attendees will learn how to leverage artificial intelligence to turn raw ideas into structured product roadmaps, prototypes, and applications with minimal coding experience. This session will showcase how to guide AI assistants through a conversational process to design, refine, and build applications quickly with a PM approach.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
CEO and Founder of Clarity.
Bharath Ramachandramurthy
Director of Product Management
Qualcomm
SESSION DETAILS
Advanced Video Experiences: Next-gen video codecs and modern HDR formats in Android Multimedia
Unleashing Advanced Video Experiences: Integrating the next-gen video codecs and modern HDR formats in Android Multimedia: Discover next generation video codecs for ultra-high quality capture and how to seamlessly implement HDR, HDR10, and Dolby Vision in Android multimedia apps for immersive in-app experiences. This session highlights modern codec’s advances in compression and color fidelity, and offers practical guidance on integrating advanced HDR formats, optimizing performance with Qualcomm hardware, and ensuring robust playback across devices. Perfect for developers aiming to deliver cinematic-quality video and future-ready app experiences using Qualcomm’s leading-edge platforms.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
A passionate Technical Product Manager with a keen eye in defining, developing new, and differentiating products to ensure the products thrive in the market. I work very closely with strategic partners to bring in their differentiation to Snapdragon platforms as well. I am a well rounded product manager with a deep software development hands-on experience from my past life.
Jason Michael Perry
Founder & Chief AI Officer
PerryLabs
SESSION DETAILS
Development for the AI-First Era
Development is at a huge shift. GenAI, agentic systems, and new coding tools are not just changing how we write code, they are redefining the entire paradigm for how we approach DevOps and manage software development. AI is removing some of the bottlenecks that shaped our current processes, making it possible to move from an idea to a working prototype in hours instead of weeks. This speed changes how we plan projects, how we allocate resources, and how we think about the roles on our teams. This is about building AI-enabled teams and workflows, not just adding AI into our toolchain. In an AI native world, developers, architects, and designers must learn to orchestrate workflows with AI, manage and curate the data that drives it, and design systems that can adapt in real time. That means rethinking team structures, delivery cycles, testing strategies, and even how we measure success.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jason Michael Perry is the Founder and Chief AI Officer of PerryLabs and author of The AI Evolution. A veteran technologist with 20+ years of experience, he advises organizations on AI strategy, intelligent systems, and innovation. He writes the weekly newsletter Thoughts on Tech & Things. Jason serves on the board of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Baltimore, and as a Senior Advisor at the World Trade Center Institute. In 2023, he led the award-winning AI in A Minor, blending classical music with AI-composed performances in partnership with AWS and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
Andrey Mikhalchuk
CTO
Craftus
SESSION DETAILS
Data Visualization in Augmented and Virtual Reality
I presented this at a Data Visualization Meetup in DC (~70 people in attendance, 40min), and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In addition to discussing why someone might want to visualize data in AR/VR, I’d like to demo how this type of visualization works. I’ll bring a VR headset and also let people try it in AR mode on their phones.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrey is the Chief Technical Officer at Craftus.
Mary Leaf
Founder
MLof Strategies
SESSION DETAILS
Fireside Chat
Fireside Chat with Lior Hacohen, we will discuss compliance from a security perspective and the importance of early implementation.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Mary Leaf is Founder at MLofStrategies.
Binita Mehta
Principal Software Engineer
Hearst
SESSION DETAILS
Product Matching at Scale with AI and ML
Product matching i.e. matching the same product across retailers is key to driving revenue in our marketplace model — by identifying duplicate listings, we can prioritize retailers that best work for our business. Other industry use cases include catalog consolidation, recommendations and price comparison. However, it is a notoriously hard problem to solve - product data often varies in structure, terminology, and completeness across sources. In this talk, we'll share our prototype system that combines text and image embeddings, machine learning, and LLM-as-a-judge to improve match precision. Attendees will learn how this led to more matched products and incremental revenue.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Binita Meta is a Principal Software Engineer at Hearst.
Andrew Levine
Sales Engineering Lead
SZNS Solutions
SESSION DETAILS
DevFestDC 2025 Agentic AI Challenge (Hackathon)
Are you ready to build a futuristic solution capable of optimizing a repeatable business process? Are you a developer, data scientist, designer, tinkerer, or just a tech enthusiast ready to explore the next frontier of AI? At the DevFestDC 2025 Agentic AI Challenge , you can form a team and spend the day bringing your innovative solution to life! We'll dive deep into the emerging world of Agentic AI - intelligent systems that act, adapt, communicate, and solve complex real-world challenges autonomously. Join the best minds from startups, corporations, and academia as you tackle use cases in government, finance, travel, consumer, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing and other enterprise functions including IT.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Levine is a Sales Engineering Lead at SZNS Solutions.
Ryan Bannon
Senior Software Engineer
SZNS Solutions
SESSION DETAILS
DevFestDC 2025 Agentic AI Challenge (Hackathon)
Learn how to build Agentic AI applications with Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ryan Bannon is a Senior Software Engineer at SZNS Solutions.
Priyanka Jain
Executive Director of Engineering
Hearst
SESSION DETAILS
Product Matching at Scale with AI and ML
Product matching i.e. matching the same product across retailers is key to driving revenue in our marketplace model — by identifying duplicate listings, we can prioritize retailers that best work for our business. However, it is a notoriously hard problem to solve - product data often varies in structure, terminology, and completeness across sources. In this talk, we'll share our prototype system that combines text and image embeddings, machine learning, and LLM-as-a-judge to improve match precision. Attendees will learn how this led to more matched products and incremental revenue.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Priyanka Jain is the Executive Director of Engineering at Hearst.
Yufeng Guo
Developer Advocate
Google
SESSION DETAILS
Keras in the age of GenAI and LLMs
Keras has long been loved for its ease of use. Beyond that, it now has new capabilities to power your generative AI workflows. In this talk, learn how to use KerasHub to load model checkpoints from HuggingFace Hub, perform function calling from your favorite LLM, and see the flexibility of working with PyTorch, JAX, and NNX. Now you can enjoy the familiarity and well designed APIs of Keras while working on your latest GenAI ideas.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Yufeng is a Developer Advocate focusing on open source machine learning libraries. Yufeng has been at Google for eleven years, and in previous roles at Google, he built systems to create and curate bespoke datasets for LLMs, created the YouTube series "AI Adventures" at yt.be/AIAdventures, and has spoken at conferences around the globe, including Google I/O, Cloud Next, O'Reilly AI and Strata, PyCon, PyData, ML Prague, dotAI, and OSCON. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He is an avid marathoner and also plays the violin in the NYC Googler Orchestra.
Vinay Pandurangi
Senior Staff Engineer/Manager
Qualcomm
SESSION DETAILS
Advanced Video Experiences: Next-gen video codecs and modern HDR formats in Android Multimedia
Advanced Video Experiences: Next-gen video codecs and modern HDR formats in Android Multimedia
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Vinay Pandurangi is a Senior Staff Engineer/Manager a Qualcomm.
Vinay Pandurangi
Senior Staff Engineer/Manager
Qualcomm
SESSION DETAILS
Advanced Video Experiences: Next-gen video codecs and modern HDR formats in Android Multimedia
Advanced Video Experiences: Next-gen video codecs and modern HDR formats in Android Multimedia
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Vinay Pandurangi is a Senior Staff Engineer/Manager a Qualcomm.
Anantha Movva
Managing Director, Site Reliability
Deloitte
SESSION DETAILS
Fail Fast; Fix Smarter: Empowering Developers with AI-Driven Reliability Mindsets
Resilience & Reliability in current AI Adoption curve across enterprises.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Anantha Movva is Managing Director, Site Reliability Engineering Leadership at Deloitte.
Martino Yovo
Product Engineer
Esri
SESSION DETAILS
Beyond APIs: Connecting Your App to the AI Ecosystem with MCP
APIs gave apps data. MCP (Model Context Protocol) gives apps intelligence. With MCP, developers can let AI models directly connect to their apps and tools, making them usable as part of a broader AI ecosystem.
In this session, we’ll demystify how MCP works and show how to make your app “AI-ready.” You’ll see how to:- Expose your app’s functions and workflows as MCP tools - Enable AI models like Gemini to call into your app for real-world actions- Build secure, context-rich bridges between your app and external AI systems - Demo: a Flutter app that acts as a travel assistant, where Gemini (via MCP) retrieves flight data and executes actions inside the app.
In the near future, apps won’t just talk to users: they’ll collaborate with AI agents. This session provides a clear roadmap and working example for making your apps first-class citizens in this new AI-driven ecosystem.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Martino is a Product Engineer and a Google Developer Expert for Flutter and Dart. He builds tools and SDKs that make technology more accessible and has guided thousands of developers through training, mentorship, and open-source contributions. Martino is passionate about developer experience and helping engineers turn ideas into impactful products.
Dustin Sell
Principle Architect
Google
SESSION DETAILS
DevFestDC 2025 Agentic AI Challenge (Hackathon)
Learn how to build Agentic AI applications with Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dustin Sell is a Principal Architect with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. His journey began as a software developer, where he honed his technical skills and gained a deep understanding of the software development lifecycle. Driven by a passion for innovation, Dustin transitioned into cloud computing architecture 12 years ago, where he has since established himself as a leading expert in cloud-based solutions.
In his current role as a Principal Architect on the DOE team at Google Public Sector, Dustin is responsible for designing, building, and managing complex cloud solutions for the Department of Energy.
Cornelius M. George
Co-Founder & CEO
Chuqlab
SESSION DETAILS
Can vibe-coding produce a viable MVP?
In the new AI-enabled coding environment, vibe-coding is both an enticing and often-misunderstood reality. Learn key insights through the startup phase in the AI-enabled coding world.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Cornelius M. George is the founder of Amari AI, a holding company for his portfolio of AI ventures, and co-founder/CEO of Chuqlab, a GovTech SaaS startup building tools that help investigators turn raw evidence into actionable leads. Chuqlab’s flagship product, CrimeMiner, has grown from a lean MVP into a platform that helps law-enforcement teams take predators, traffickers, and violent offenders off the streets.
He also co-founded Human Frontier Labs, an AI consultancy and studio that partners with enterprises and public-sector organizations to move beyond hype and build real, working AI solutions. Across these companies, Cornelius has one focus: prove that AI can go from idea → MVP → paying customer faster than ever before.
Ganesh Seetharaman
Managing Director-AI, Data & Engineering Leader
Deloitte
SESSION DETAILS
Fireside Chat: “Fail Fast, Fix Smarter—Engineering Reliability in the Age of AI”
Welcome to a candid engineer-to-engineer discussion about today’s reliability challenges—and why AI is no longer optional, but foundational.Developers are expected to fail fast, recover faster, and now think smarter.Speed is non-negotiable, but what’s really reshaping the game? AI—no longer just another tool, but a strategic partner developing a solution or writing a code. Let’s be real: developers have to channel their inner startup founder now—test relentlessly, adapt on the fly, and figure out how to push boundaries inside complicated frameworks.
This Fireside chat isn’t about tech hype; we’re tackling the realities of how AI is revolutionizing how to build solutions that are reliable. We’ll confront the tough questions: • Are we building smarter teams, or just accelerating the pipeline? • What does real developer autonomy look like when AI is making decisions in real time? • Which new skills and mindsets are essential for developers to keep control in an AI-driven environment?
Let’s talk about how you lead it, not just survive it.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ganesh is a managing director at Deloitte, leading our resiliency engineering market offerings wihtin AI, Data & Engineering. With more than 25 years of experience, Ganesh specializes in IT & cloud strategy, enterprise architecture, and technical operations across multiple industries. He is known for orchestrating enterprise-wide digital transformations that deliver measurable business impact and for building high-performing global technology organizations.
Ganesh’s mission is to drive technological advancement that positions organizations for sustainable competitive advantage. He has matured digital capabilities for Fortune 100 enterprises and global corporations, blending enterprise architecture, cloud transformation, and digital strategy to help clients become innovative technology leaders, build reliable systems and mitigate operational risks.
As a change agent, Ganesh focuses on real-world outcomes—creating and communicating value to leadership, stakeholders, and teams. He is a certified cloud architect, respected thought leader, and brings international experience from the US and UK.
Nathen Harvey
DORA Lead, Google Cloud
Google
SESSION DETAILS
Building in the AI-first world: Scale brilliance, not bottlenecks
In an AI-first world, everyone can be a builder. But building is just the beginning. Shipping and running reliable applications that users love is what matters. This session will reveal a critical truth: AI's primary role is that of an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones. Let's look at how your team can scale brilliance and eliminate bottlenecks, enabling builders everywhere
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Nathen Harvey leads the DORA team at Google Cloud. He leverages industry-shaping research to drive product strategy and help organizations improve software delivery speed, stability, and the developer experience. A frequent speaker on DevOps and AI, Nathen is dedicated to building solutions that empower technical communities. He co-authored multiple DORA reports and contributed to "97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know" published by O’Reilly in 2020.
Amanda J Kendal-Brown
Senior Front-End Engineer
Capital One
SESSION DETAILS
Two Tablets, One Bench: Real-Time Multiplayer at the Edge with Durable Objects and Workers AI
Picture two roller derby coaches at opposite ends of a bench, both holding tablets and both needing to see the same jam unfold in real time, with no backend team, no compromise on the live experience, and a third read-only tablet they can hand to whoever wanders over. That’s Bench Witch, and the underlying problem is everywhere: collaborative whiteboards, multi-user POS systems, shared dashboards, and any product where multiple clients need to edit shared state in real time.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amanda Kendal-Brown is a Senior Front-End Engineer at Capital One with a decade of experience building accessible, AI-enabled web applications in React, TypeScript, and Vue. She built Bench Witch, the subject of this talk, for her own roller derby team.
Outside of code, Amanda is a two-sport international athlete, representing Trinidad & Tobago on the National Archery Team and Team West Indies at three Roller Derby World Cups (2014, 2018, 2025). She is also a classically-trained percussionist specializing in steel pan and orchestral percussion, and currently performs baritone with the Reading Buccaneers Drum & Bugle Corps.
Based in Fairfax, VA, she's passionate about building tools for the communities she's part of and bringing underrepresented voices to the technical stage.
Ramandeep Arora
Embedded Software Engineer
Stanley Black & Decker
SESSION DETAILS
Beyond the Cloud: Building Physical AI with Embedded Systems
Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to the cloud or screens - it is beginning to live inside the physical world. From smart wearables that monitor heart rate and detect anomalies in real time to industrial power tools that automatically adjust torque under changing load conditions, intelligence is shifting closer to where data is created and actions actually happen. This shift, often called edge computing, or physical AI, is redefining how we think about intelligence in everyday systems.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
I'm Ramandeep Arora, and I'm an Embedded Software Engineer at Stanley Black & Decker, specializing in motor controls, IoT, and robotics systems for the power tools and industrial trade industry. I'm passionate about Embedded AI and Edge Intelligence with a focus on bringing machine learning closer to physical systems. Experienced on microcontrollers, motor controls, and building reliable, production-grade embedded solutions and advocating for making smart sustainable devices with advanced technology that is accessible and human-centric through engineering and community engagement.
Brandon Wagner
Software Engineer
Oxide Computer Company
SESSION DETAILS
Kubernetes Node Autoscaling w/ Karpenter
Kubernetes has changed how we manage cloud and on-prem environments. But some aspects of the node lifecycle have not fully embraced the Kubernetes API. This has meant context-switching between IaC tools and Kubernetes which adds unnecessary complexity. Karpenter aims to modernize node autoscaling and lifecycle management in Kubernetes: it auto-discovers cloud capabilities, launches the best hardware for the job, and powers it down when it's no longer needed. Come learn about Karpenter and see it in action!
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Brandon Wagner graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor's in Computer Science and a master's in Information Security. He began his career working on fire protection software for nuclear power plants before spending over eight years at AWS, working on EC2, EKS, and Route 53. He worked on Karpenter pre-launch and as a core maintainer for several years after. Brandon now works at Oxide Computer Company, where he brings cloud and Kubernetes capabilities to hardware that you own!
Alexandrea Stylianou
Senior Data Engineer
AS
SESSION DETAILS
Schema Archaeology: How AI accelerated an Undocumented Database to an Autonomous Finance Agent
It’s Monday morning and the Accounts Payable team gets a Slack message: “Why was invoice INV-2291 flagged, and how much exposure do we have with this vendor?” The data is in a legacy Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) system — dozens of tables, no data dictionary, weak foreign keys, and a schema that only one retiring analyst ever fully understood. Unfortunately, a generic chatbot would only give guesses or a junior analyst would spend half the day tracing data across joins nobody documented. I will show you how I built a P2P Context Engine to handle exactly that kind of question — end to end, with financial precision.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Data Architect, Data Scientist, and ML/AI expert who builds production applications to transform data into faster decisions, lower risk, and better customer outcomes.
Bryce Howitson
Senior UI Engineer
Google Developer Expert
SESSION DETAILS
Human Computer Interaction: The UX of AI
Prompt Engineer, so hot right now! Do you wonder why we need an entire specialization dedicated to communicating with a computer? Does it feel like "it just doesn't get you" when "chatting" with AI tools?
In this session, we'll cover the history of ways humans have communicated with computers. You'll see why "natural language" doesn't seem to translate as you expected. Finally, you'll learn options for creating an interface with AI that doesn't require a special title. Along the way, you'll learn to create trust and reduce hallucinations.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bryce is obsessed with creating products that people want to use. He helps organizations of all sizes test, and ship their ideas.
Bryce has been speaking since the age of 3. Sometimes called a designer, a developer, a strategist, a writer, and even a carpenter, he has led teams and worked in the trenches. Bryce is a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, a certified Design Sprint Master, a list over-user, and a recovering "filler word" addict. He shares his knowledge by mentoring and teaching from his homeland, the not-always-frozen Minnesota.
Chanel Power
Founder & CEO
Mentor Me Collective
SESSION DETAILS
#AirClaw: Build Self-Healing Agents with Apache Airflow and NVIDIA NemoClaw
#AirClaw demonstrates how Apache Airflow and NVIDIA NemoClaw transform static pipelines into autonomous agents that reason, act, and escalate intelligently. Two live demos ( a NYC 311 overnight triage agent and an automated LLM model migration evaluation comparing GPT-4o against Llama-3.3-Nemotron-Super ) show the same three-layer architecture solving real production problems across two completely different domains.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Chanel Power doesn't just build technology — she builds the systems that determine who gets to.
A Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Developer Relations leader, and Founder & CEO of Mentor Me Collective, Chanel operates at the intersection of technical excellence and global access. She has shipped production ML systems, advised 30+ early-stage AI product teams annually, and built a global technical institute serving 40K+ developers across 120+ countries, generating $45M+ in career outcomes for 600+ first-generation technologists.
Mentor Me Collective is a Google for Startups partner, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center alumni, and by every measure, a developer relations program at true scale, with enablement programs running at 3x industry engagement benchmarks and partnerships spanning Google Cloud, IBM, and Grow with Google.
Chrystian Vieyra Cortes
Director of Engineering
Thomson Reuters
SESSION DETAILS
AppFunctions: Making Your Android App Agent-Ready
The AppFunctions Jetpack framework allows apps to expose structured, callable capabilities directly to the OS and on-device AI agents. This marks a fundamental shift away from fragile screen scraping and rigid intents, enabling true agentic development where models natively discover and invoke your app's features.
We will demystify how AppFunctions work and contrast them with older approaches like App Actions and MCP. Through a focused code demo, you will see how to define typed, callable functions that allow agents to execute tasks straight from natural language prompts.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
I am a mobile engineering leader focused on building strong teams and mobile apps that reach millions of users.
I am currently Director of Software Engineering at Thomson Reuters, where I lead mobile engineering for the Reuters app. My work focuses on engineering execution, platform modernization, and helping distributed teams deliver high-quality mobile experiences.
Meheret Egzerab
Founder & Software Engineer
Studio Rehoboth
SESSION DETAILS
Lessons from Shipping a Real App: Vibe Coding in Production
I vibe coded a consumer iOS app and shipped it solo, ~5,000 downloads, ~33% paid conversion, zero ad spend. This talk is everything those numbers didn't teach me until after I shipped.
I'll walk through the real lessons from taking AI-assisted code into production: the layer AI silently skips (error reporting, and the analytics that actually predict retention and conversion), the AI-generated code that broke in ways I didn't see coming. Real dashboards, real crash logs, real numbers, including the app I'm still getting wrong right now.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Meheret Egzerab is the solo founder of Studio Rehoboth, a one-person app studio, where she designs, builds, and ships consumer apps using AI-assisted development. She previously worked as a software engineer at Capital One. She speaks and writes about what it actually takes to ship AI-built software into production as a team of one.
Olga Ostrovskiy
Founder & Lead Software Engineer
My Storyland
SESSION DETAILS
From Bookshelf to Borderline: Building a Multi-Agent AI That Turns Books Into Travel
What if an AI could read a novel and hand you an itinerary? That's the question behind My Storyland — a multi-agent Gemini system that extracts real-world locations from literary works and transforms them into personalized travel experiences.
In this talk, I'll walk through how I designed and built a collaborative agent architecture — Guide, Book Searcher, Location Extractor, and Composer — that doesn't just chain prompts, but assigns distinct roles, manages context handoffs, and synthesizes outputs into something genuinely useful. I'll cover how I evaluated agent performance using Langfuse, why human-in-the-loop checkpoints matter even when your agents "work," and how Pydantic-validated schemas keep your agent outputs structured and trustworthy instead of free-form and fragile.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Olga Ostrovskiy is a lead software engineer and founder of My Storyland (mystoryland.ai), a book-inspired travel platform powered by a multi-agent Gemini AI architecture. She placed 3rd at Google's 5-Day AI Agents Intensive (December 2025) for her work on My Storyland and is currently building it into a startup. She builds with NestJS, React, and Google's AI stack.
Santosh Srinivasaiah
Vice President, Data Science & Analytics
Diaconia LLC
SESSION DETAILS
Systems That Settle: Control Theory for Adaptive AI
Agents, recommenders, and reinforcement-learning loops all tune themselves at runtime — and most ship with no guarantee they'll settle rather than oscillate, drift, or quietly degrade until it surfaces in production. We're good at building systems that adapt, and bad at proving they'll behave.
Control engineers solved a version of this decades ago. Lyapunov stability theory proves a system converges to its target instead of assuming it will — the same principle that keeps a self-driving car centered in its lane. This session brings it to the systems we build now, and is honest about the catch: a proof is only as strong as the model beneath it. The math is rigorous; the assumptions are where the risk hides. That line — what the proof buys, and where it stops — is the talk.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Santosh Srinivasaiah is Vice President of Data Science & Analytics at Diaconia, with over 25 years of experience building AI systems at the intersection of computational neuroscience and generative AI. He has spent many years architecting machine-learning platforms for regulatory science, and today leads the design of generative and agentic AI grounded in brain-inspired algorithms. A published researcher across neuroscience and applied AI, he is the architect of STACS, a framework that applies Lyapunov stability theory to bring provable convergence guarantees to adaptive cognitive systems — the same principle at the heart of this talk. He teaches as adjunct faculty at Northern Virginia Community College and is a member of the ACM and IEEE. A returning DevFestDC speaker, Santosh is back to share how control theory can make the systems we build actually settle.
Noble Ackerson
Senior Director, AI and Agentic Solutions
Leidos
SESSION DETAILS
Immersive vs Ambient XR: The Debate
If your multi-agent pipeline forces users to watch a loading spinner while it thinks, you have already lost them. But if your agent hallucinates a high-pressure gas line on a city street, you have a much bigger problem. Aligned with the "Build Edition" theme, this session strips away the "Hello, World" chatbot boilerplate to walk through the architecture of The Invisible City—a real-time, see-through AR visualization of underground municipal infrastructure. We will dissect how to pair Gemini’s multimodal vision capabilities with a Next.js and FastAPI stack to build event-driven agents that actually interact with the physical world.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Noble Ackerson is the Senior Director of AI and Agentic Solutions at Leidos, a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for AI, and an instructor for Udacity's Agentic AI programs. With over 19 years of experience bridging software engineering and machine learning, Noble focuses on "calibrated trust", building responsible, governed, and highly performant distributed multi-agent systems that survive real-world deployment.
He actively prototypes at the intersection of generative UI, spatial computing, and vendor-agnostic agent orchestration.
Allen Firstenberg
Senior Project Engineer
myTurn pbc
SESSION DETAILS
Immersive vs Ambient XR: The Debate
A debate is raging in the XR community - which is the "correct" form factor for Intelligent Eyewear? Should we be focusing on the ambient experience from "AI Glasses" such as the models now appearing from Google, Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker? Or should we have more of an immersive AR or VR experience, such as those from XREAL or the Apple VisionPro? Allen and Noble continue their many-year-long debate on this topic, last heard at DevFest DC in 2017. Which is the right technology?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
By day, Allen is a Senior Project Engineer at spiders.com where he’s been instrumental in creating websites and mobile apps for companies and organizations, ranging from the American Booksellers Association to the National Science Foundation. By night he creates tools, software, and tutorials to help people share their stories and improve their digital lives. You'll find him contributing to the LangChainJS open source project, as one of the two hosts of the "Two Voice Devs" podcast, and co-author of the O’Reilly book “Designing and Developing for Google Glass”. He is a Google Developer Expert for Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and the Google Assistant and has been known to occasionally wear light blue shirts.
Chris Whong
Head of Developer Relations
Mapbox
SESSION DETAILS
Great Maps Don't Happen by Accident: Building Exceptional Location Experiences with the Mapbox Android SDKs
Maps, search, navigation, real-world data — your users expect it all, and Mapbox delivers it in a single location platform built for Android developers. In this session, we'll start from zero and build up a fully featured location experience live: custom map styles, GeoJSON overlays, a working Search Box integration, and a turn-by-turn navigation flow with simulated routes and voice. We'll also cover what's new across the Mapbox ecosystem and show off the developer tools that help you move from idea to shipped feature, fast.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
As a Senior Developer Evangelist at Mapbox with over four years of experience, I focus on enhancing developer relations and technical documentation to empower developers and facilitate their success. My work revolves around leading the development of docs.mapbox.com, a multi-site platform with millions of annual views, where I aim to create user-friendly, dynamic documentation and interactive tools. My expertise spans GIS, spatial analysis, and urban planning, all aimed at building innovative tools at the intersection of maps, data, and technology.
Kiruthika Subramani
Data Scientist
Bell Canada
SESSION DETAILS
Build the same AI agent in six frameworks and learn which one actually fits your problem
Everyone has a favourite framework. Nobody has tried all of them on the same problem.
You learned LangChain from a tutorial. Your colleague swears by ADK. Someone says AgentKit is the future. CrewAI keeps showing up in multi-agent demos. And your manager asks why you are writing code when Vertex AI Agent Builder exists. Each one solves a different problem and picking the wrong one means weeks fighting the framework instead of building your product.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
I am Kiruthika Subramani, a Data Scientist at Bell, Canada. Did my Master's at MILA, the Quebec AI Institute. I have written two books on AI, delivered over 250 talks across the globe, and published more than 100 blogs. My recognitions include being a Google Developer Expert in AI, an IBM Champion for Data and AI, and a Women Techmakers Ambassador. My experience includes serving as the former Head of AI at Musitechnic Formation and interning at Amazon. I am a nine-time certified cloud practitioner (4x GCP, 5x AWS) and was honoured to be named the Women in AI Scholarship Award Winner for 2025.
Pragya Keshap
Lead Technical Architect - AI Engineering & Ops
Schwab
SESSION DETAILS
From APIs to AI Agents
In this session, we will explore how to design a secure tool-calling workflow using Gemini, Agent Development Kit, and Google Cloud. Attendees will learn how to move from a simple chatbot prototype to a production-ready agent architecture that can safely call enterprise APIs, return structured responses, and log actions for review.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
I help organizations build scalable, secure, and AI-ready infrastructure on Google Cloud. As a Google Developer Expert, I specialize in Kubernetes, GKE, enterprise cloud architecture, and AI/ML infrastructure — bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and real-world enterprise adoption.
My work spans technical thought leadership, open-source contributions within the CNCF ecosystem, and speaking at global conferences where I share practical insights on cloud-native transformation. I'm also actively involved in research at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and AI.
Ammar Ekbote
Senior Software Engineer
Pinterest
SESSION DETAILS
Moving Beyond the Prompt: Powering Google Antigravity with MCP Servers
In this talk, we will explore the architecture of local (stdio) and remote (HTTP) MCP servers within the Antigravity suite (2.0, IDE, and CLI). We’ll walk through how to build a custom MCP server from scratch, securely handle authentication via Application Default Credentials (ADC), and set up strict access control policies. Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of how to transform an AI from a text-generator into an autonomous development partner capable of safely executing data-aware workflows.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ammar Govind Ekbote is a Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest, where he focuses on building and scaling global software infrastructure. An expert in distributed data systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and kernel-level observability, Ammar has a proven track record of bridging complex back-end architectures with emerging AI technologies. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. With 9+ approved U.S. patents and extensive experience judging elite hackathons and industry innovation awards, Ammar is passionate about building secure, context-aware systems that empower the next generation of AI-driven development tools.
Christina Lin
Developer Relations Engineering Manager
Google
SESSION DETAILS
Architecting Long-Running, Resumable Agents with ADK 2
What happens when your AI agent needs to join a queue of 14,000 people, wait 40 minutes, survive a process crash mid-wait, and spend $400 of real money while you’re asleep?
Most agent tutorials teach you how to prompt. This hands-on workshop teaches you how to build long running agents using Google Cloud and the Agent Development Kit (ADK 2), you will hands-on build a ticketing agent from scratch and then break it. We'll pull the plug mid-execution, simulate race conditions, enforce financial spending fences, and deploy a resumable agent architecture that runs without you in the room.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
As the Lead Advocate for Google Americas, Christina Lin bridges the gap between cutting-edge technologies and developer success. With deep expertise in Agentic systems, and modern cloud architectures—including Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Java, Python, and Ansible—she creates dynamic technical content and live demonstrations that drive the adoption of intelligent, scalable best practices. An open-source champion at heart, Christina’s mission is to cultivate a highly collaborative, innovative, and deeply connected global developer community ready for the AI era.
Mike Wolfson
Lead Developer
Target
SESSION DETAILS
AI Ate My Codebase
Your codebase was fine. Then you gave AI a taste. Join us for this honest, and slightly chaotic look at what happens when you let AI loose on real production code. I'll dig into what worked, what exploded, and what I would never admit to my tech leads.
I'll cover the full arc — from writing prompts that actually work, to understanding why agents are a completely different beast from chatbots, to the $0.60 mistake that taught me more than any tutorial ever did. Whether you're an AI-curious skeptic or someone who's already handed the keys to OpenClaw, you'll walk away with the habits that separate people who use AI like a professional from everyone else still using it like a tourist.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Mike is a Google Developer Expert and product-focused developer working out of Phoenix. He has been working in the software field for more than 20 years, and with Android since its introduction. He is the author of the book "Android Developer Tools Essentials" published by O’Reilly. He currently works for Target as a Lead Android Engineer.
He has spoken about software development at a variety of conferences and user groups (including Google IO, Oredev, Oscon, GDGSiliconValley, Oredev, Droidcon NYC & Turin, AnDevCon, and others). When he is not geeking out about phones, he enjoys the outdoors (snowboarding, hiking, scuba diving), collecting PEZ dispensers, and chasing his young (but quick) daughter.
Naveen Nigam
Head of Developer Relations - Americas
Google
SESSION DETAILS
Building in the AI Era: What Developers Need to Know About AI Policy (Google, Developers Alliance, Trustible)
AI is moving fast—and policy is racing to catch up. This fireside chat explores the latest developments in AI policy, what developers should expect next, and why it matters.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Naveen Nigam is a natural leader experienced in leading large cross-functional teams. 20 years of strategic management, program/project management, operations, change management & policy creation experience. A tenacious attitude, skilled at fostering strategic alignment at all levels of an organization. Comes with a track record and proven ability to build relationships, creating 'win-win' situations.
Chris Grimm
Head of US Policy & Advocacy
Developers Alliance
SESSION DETAILS
Building in the AI Era: What Developers Need to Know About AI Policy (Google, Developers Alliance, Trustible)
AI is moving fast—and policy is racing to catch up. This fireside chat explores the latest developments in AI policy, what developers should expect next, and why it matters.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Chris Grimm is an experienced communications and media relations specialist with expertise in campaign management, government relations, political communications, and professional services. Critical minerals and strategic materials platform founder. Motivated and results-oriented leader with proven success in the political, legislative and public affairs arenas.
Andrew Gamino-Cheong
CTO & Co-Founder
Trustible
SESSION DETAILS
Building in the AI Era: What Developers Need to Know About AI Policy (Google, Developers Alliance, Trustible)
AI is moving fast—and policy is racing to catch up. This fireside chat explores the latest developments in AI policy, what developers should expect next, and why it matters.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Andrew Gamino-Cheong is an experienced Software Architect, ML Engineer and tech lead with a focus on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, working in the legal tech space. Strong engineering professional with a Master of Science (M.S) degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland College Park and a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science (with a double major in Government) from Georgetown University. I regularly share my thoughts on AI Governance on my company's blog: https://www.trustible.ai/blog.
John Lee
Cofounder & CEO
SZNS
SESSION DETAILS
Challenges, considerations, and capabilities in building agentic systems
Challenges, considerations, and capabilities in building agentic systems
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
John Lee is the cofounder and CEO of SZNS Solutions, an AI-native software services & consulting company specializing in Google Cloud Platform. SZNS (pronounced "seasons") was named Partner of the Year for Government Services by Google Cloud in 2026. John previously led blockchain efforts at Google. John Lee is the cofounder and CEO of SZNS Solutions, an AI-native software services & consulting company specializing in Google Cloud Platform. SZNS (pronounced "seasons") was named Partner of the Year for Government Services by Google Cloud in 2026. John previously led blockchain efforts at Google.
Rezaur Rahman
CIO
ACHP
SESSION DETAILS
Challenges, considerations, and capabilities in building agentic systems
Challenges, considerations, and capabilities in building agentic systems
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Rezaur Rahman serves as CIO, CISO, CAIO, and Threat Intelligence Chair, bringing 20 years of federal service and deep technical expertise in applied artificial intelligence, geospatial AI, and cybersecurity. He is currently building a national-scale, AI-native system in partnership with Google and leading research labs, spanning geospatial reasoning, generative interfaces, mechanistic interpretability, evolutionary algorithms, and AI security. Rahman speaks regularly on the design of agentic AI architectures, with a focus on embedding intelligence in the data layer to improve model reasoning. Recent talks include Google Next '26, the Google Public Sector Summit '25, and the 2026 Google Public Sector CISO Roundtable, where he presented on applying interpretability, self-improving algorithms, and generative code to cybersecurity detection and response to protect critical infrastructure.
DevFestDC is an annual, community-led software engineering conference designed to educate software developers, architects, entrepreneurs, quality-focused individuals, and tech leaders.
DevFest is the world's largest community-driven tech conference, bringing together passionate developers from around the globe. Hosted annually by Google Developer Groups, DevFest offers a unique opportunity to explore cutting-edge developer tools, learn from Google and Google Developer Experts, and connect with fellow developers in your local community.
Take the Orange/Silver line to Virginia Square-GMU station (2-minute walk). Paid parking is available, but it's limited. We strongly recommend using public transportation or a ride-sharing service for your convenience. For on-site parking, you can find paid options at Van Metre Hall Parking Garage and Vernon Smith Parking Garage. There are also a few street parking spots available.
9AM — 6PM | August 28, 2026
DevFest DC
Fuse Center at George Mason University, 3351 Fairfax Dr