Applying AI Events in Brighton

Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference in Brighton, United Kingdom

Microsoft Foundry is a platform that makes it easier to discover, run, and experiment with AI models. In this hands-on session, we'll show you how to run a small AI model locally on your own machine, giving you more control over how and where your AI works.

• Learn how to run AI on your own laptop
• Set up and test a small language model step by step
• Understand when local AI makes sense vs cloud AI
• Leave with something working

✨Further details:

- Install Microsoft Foundry Local on your laptop
- Download and run a small AI model on your own device
- Chat with the model and explore what it can and can't do
- Learn the difference between local AI and cloud AI services like ChatGPT and Copilot
- Build a simple AI agent that can read and categorise documents
- Experiment with changing instructions to make the agent perform different tasks
- See how local AI can be used to process sensitive information without sending data to the cloud
- Leave with working examples you can continue to build on at home

This session is designed for beginners through to experienced builders. You don't need to be a developer, but you should be comfortable following step-by-step instructions on your computer.

Rather than just talking about AI, you'll get hands-on experience with:

• Running AI locally
• Understanding how AI models work
• Building simple AI agents
• Using prompts and instructions effectively
• Knowing when local AI is a better choice than cloud AI
• Turning AI from a chatbot into a practical tool for real work

By the end of the session, you'll have:

• An AI model running on your own machine
• A working AI-powered document sorting tool
• The knowledge to start building your own local AI projects
• A clearer understanding of how businesses can use AI securely and privately

This month, returning presenter Will Martin will be joining us to tell us about
From Open Storage to Open Meaning: How Apache Ossie (Incubating) Completes the Open Data Lakehouse

Will writes:

The open data lakehouse has a solid data foundation thanks to Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris: an open table format and catalog any query engine can share without lock-in. But openness in storage doesn't mean openness in meaning. Business context, like “revenue” and “active customer”, tends to sit in downstream systems, like notebooks and BI tools. These definitions tend to not agree and they don’t travel well between systems. That is, until Apache Ossie (Incubating), the newly Apache-incubated open spec for semantic layers and ontologies, backed by Snowflake, Dremio, Databricks, dbt Labs, and Salesforce.

This talk will explain the current open data lakehouse stack and introduce Apache Ossie (Incubating). We’ll discuss how open source projects provide vendor-neutral options without sacrificing performance, and why shared semantics is the next open standards fight in this age of agentic analytics.

Also, we've got a lightning talk lined up on Microsoft Fabric, straight from the trenches :)

The Fabric Tax

Mehmet Yolcu - BI Lead, Brighton & Hove City Council

What does Microsoft's so-called unified analytics platform actually cost data teams once the demo wraps and production kicks in? Mehmet's back at the Brighton Data Forum with a holistic look at Fabric after a year of real-world use. If you're weighing up Fabric, or already paying the tax, this is 15 minutes of field notes you won't get from the keynote.

Please be punctual, the event is hosted by our loyal hosts at Barclay's Eagle Labs in their Platf9rm offices, supported by Silicon Brighton and sponsored by Rittman Analytics.