Software Engineering Events in Cork

Join industry leaders to explore how tech, talent and transformation are shaping the future of Ireland’s life sciences sector.

This Tech Industry Alliance conference “Tech, Talent & Transformation: Advancing Excellence in Life Sciences,” will bring together industry leaders, technology innovators, educators, policymakers, and workforce development experts to explore how Ireland can continue to strengthen its position as a global life sciences powerhouse.

Taking place on 24 September at the Clayton Hotel Cork City, the event will focus on the practical actions needed to build a world-class talent pipeline, accelerate digital transformation, and enhance Ireland’s competitiveness in an increasingly technology-driven sector.

Through keynote presentations, industry case studies, expert panels, and thought-provoking discussions, delegates will examine how AI, automation, smart manufacturing, and data are reshaping operations and influencing the workforce of the future.

The programme will address key challenges including skills shortages, industry-academic collaboration, attracting and retaining talent, upskilling existing teams, and preparing for the next generation of roles in biopharma and medtech.

Featuring leading voices from industry, academia, and skills agencies, the conference will provide practical insights, real-world examples, and a clear roadmap for advancing excellence in Ireland’s life sciences ecosystem through technology, talent, and transformation.

Where business leaders and innovators explore AI, digital transformation, competitiveness and sustainable growth

The Innovation Summit is back.

Building on the success of last year, The Innovation Summit 2026 brings together business leaders, innovators, investors and ecosystem partners to explore how organisations are improving competitiveness, embracing AI, accelerating digital transformation and driving sustainable growth.

Through expert speakers, practical case studies and high-value networking, the summit will showcase how ambitious organisations are turning ideas into action—and action into measurable impact.

Whether you're leading transformation within your organisation or developing the technologies driving business performance, The Innovation Summit is where Ireland's innovation ecosystem comes together to connect, collaborate and create opportunity.

The full programme and speaker line-up will be announced shortly.

Running since June 2013, every month we have 1-2 talks focused on Security or Technology - followed by socialising with like minded people

• You can find out exactly what to expect about the night and the venue on the What We're About section of our Meetup page. Past talk details can be found the "Past Events" section.
• All people with any sort of an interest or level of knowledge in Security, Hacking and Emerging Technology are more than welcome to attend and feel free to bring like minded colleagues and friends.

CorkSec is made possible through generous sponsorship from our Platinum Sponsor TrendAI, Gold Sponsor CyberSkills , as well as our Silver and Bronze Sponsors featured prominently on the night.

Our talks come from our community so if you have an idea for a topic (anything for 10-60 minutes) please email us at DefconCork@gmail.com . Whether you are an experienced presenter, or presenting for your first time - CorkSec is a great venue for it - and we are happy to help you prepare and mentor you.

Doors open at 19:00 with talks starting at 19:15. Talks below

TALK 1: Adopting AI for Threat Defense: What Actually Works (and What’s Still Hype) by Saurabh Khadtare
A lot of people in security are understandably skeptical of “AI” right now. Marketing slides promise fully autonomous SOC's, while real defenders are still drowning in huge alerts and brittle detection logic. At the same time, attackers are already using automation and AI‑adjacent tooling to scale phishing, brute forcing, credential abuse, and exploitation, so a purely manual defensive approach is becoming unrealistic.
In this talk, I’ll share practical lessons from working as a security engineer and Pentester on how AI is actually starting to help with threat defense, and where it absolutely should not be trusted on its own. I’ll break “AI for defense” into three buckets: classical ML/UEBA and anomaly detection, AI‑powered SOC automation for triage and noise reduction, and LLM‑based that help with summarizing incidents, writing queries/rules, and translating technical findings for non‑technical stakeholders. For each bucket, I’ll walk through concrete workflows and examples (using redacted or synthetic data) showing what sucked before, what AI does better, and what still needs a human in the loop.
I’ll also cover the major limitations and risks: hallucinations, weak multi‑step reasoning, prompt injection, and new attack surfaces introduced by LLMs and vendor tools. The goal is to give the audience a realistic blueprint for where AI can safely augment defenders today, and where “AI‑only” approaches are still pure hype.

TALK 2: Confidential Computing by Nigel Douglas
You might already be familiar with industry terms such as encryption in-transit and encryption at-rest. What about encryption in-use? Confidential computing does just that. It's a cloud computing technology that specifically protects data during processing. Exclusive control of encryption keys delivers stronger end-to-end data security in the cloud. Confidential computing continues to redefine how critical infrastructure isolates sensitive data. This is achieved within a protected CPU enclave during processing. The enclave's contents, which include the data being processed and the techniques used, are accessible only to authorised programatic codes. They're invisible and unknowable to anything or anyone else, including the cloud provider. As company leaders increasingly rely on public and hybrid cloud services, data privacy in the cloud is imperative. The primary goal of my talk is to highlight how confidential computing is providing greater assurances to security leaders that their data in the cloud is actually protected and confidential, as we continue to move more of our sensitive data and computing workloads to public cloud services.