AI & ML Research Events in Amsterdam
Europe's AI and ML research scene is a long tail of university labs, community research groups, and practitioner-run meetups that together punch well above their weight globally. This page covers the research end of the AI/ML event calendar: deep-learning meetups, computer vision and NLP groups, paper-reading clubs, and research-oriented conferences. It's aimed at ML engineers, applied researchers, and PhD students who care about how the models work, rather than how to integrate them into a product (that's the Applied AI category).
This page narrows the Amsterdam calendar to AI & ML Research events. It's a subset of Netherlands's wider tech-event schedule, useful when you want something specific to go to in the city this month.
Amsterdam runs one of the strongest applied-AI event calendars in Europe. The city is full of product engineering teams actually shipping AI features, which shows up as depth in LLM integration, agent, RAG, and evaluation-focused meetups. Product management and design events are also unusually strong here (The Next Web, Mind The Product, Config EU satellites), as is the data-engineering scene around dbt and Snowflake.
Upcoming AI & ML Research events in Amsterdam
AAIF x Uber: Open Source at Uber and Polars
Amsterdam, 🇳🇱 Netherlands
The platform behind every Uber ETA and one of the fastest DataFrame libraries around, both open source. Come see how they work.
Since 2016, Michelangelo AI has been the platform Uber’s engineers use to build, train, deploy and monitor machine learning, from ETAs and pricing to fraud detection. It grew from tree models to deep learning to LLMs, and today it also carries Uber’s agent workloads. Uber has now released its core as Open Source under the Apache 2.0 license.
Polars has been built in the open since 2020. With a Rust query engine and a Python API on Apache Arrow, it has become a go-to DataFrame library for data teams, backed by an active contributor community and the Polars company.
For this edition, AAIF Community Amsterdam, Uber and Polars are spending an evening on open source. We’ll cover how both projects are built, what the teams have learned from developing them in the open, and what they can mean for your own platform. Expect architecture, trade-offs and real production numbers, not a product pitch.
What to expect
- How Michelangelo AI is built: Kubernetes-native, Python-first pipelines with Uniflow, and federated compute across clouds
- What it takes to serve ML at Uber’s scale
- How Uber runs LLMs and agents on top of its ML platform
- What makes Polars fast: lazy evaluation, query optimisation and its Rust engine
- The Polars open-source journey: growing a community and a company around an open project
- How to get started with and contribute to both projects
- Drinks, food and good company
Who should come
ML engineers, platform engineers, data engineers, data scientists and technical leads who build or run ML, data or agent infrastructure, and anyone curious how open-source infrastructure is designed, built and shared. All experience levels are welcome.
Schedule
- 17h30: Doors
- 18h00: Opening Remarks
- 18h05: Lightning talk: Agentic Open Source, Chris Howard (Uber)
- 18h15: Introducing Michelangelo AI & Demo, Melda Salhab and Qiushen Wang (Uber)
- 18h45: Chiel Peters (CTO, Polars)
- 19h15: Networking with food and drinks
Before you come
Want a head start? Michelangelo’s code is at github.com/michelangelo-ai/michelangelo and its docs at michelangelo-ai.org. Polars lives at github.com/pola-rs/polars, with docs and guides at pola.rs.
Apsara Conference Amsterdam
Amsterdam, 🇳🇱 Netherlands
There's a moment when AI stops being a demo and starts being infrastructure — when the question shifts from "what can this model do?" to "what does it do for our business, at scale, in production?"
Apsara Conference is where Alibaba Cloud answers that question. On 29 October 2026, we're bringing it to Amsterdam.
Join us at the historic Beurs van Berlage for a full day on The Rise of Data Intelligence. We open with a keynote on full-stack AI breakthroughs: the Qwen foundation models, the agent-native infrastructure behind them, and — most importantly — real customer wins, from pilot to production.
The day then opens into three parallel forums:
- Foundation Model Forum — inside the Qwen model family and what's next
- Agentic Cloud Forum — building and running AI agents on cloud-native infrastructure
- Worldwide CXO Nexus Forum — the executive conversation on AI strategy, ROI and ecosystem
Throughout the day, an interactive exhibition zone lets you get hands-on with Qwen models, agent-native cloud infrastructure, and live customer use cases across retail, manufacturing, financial services and media.
Whether you're shipping your first AI feature or scaling it across the enterprise, this is a day to see what's actually working — and to meet the builders and partners making it work in Europe and beyond.
🎟 Free to attend — places are limited and registration is subject to approval.
đź“Ť Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
🗓 Thursday, 29 October 2026, 09:15 – 18:00 CET
Coming through one of our community partners? Tell us when you register — we have something special waiting for you.