Tech Events in Leiden

We’re back with another AI in Life Sciences meetup!

Whether you’re a researcher, data scientist, startup founder, or simply curious about how AI is shaping the future of healthcare and biotech, you’re welcome to join us for an evening of learning, discussion, and networking.

16:30 - Welcome snacks and drinks

17:00 / Talk 1 From FAIR Data to Trustworthy AI: Machine-Actionable Knowledge, Explainability, and the LIFES Ecosystem

Barend Mons - A Dutch molecular biologist and leading FAIR data expert whose work spans malaria research, biosemantics, advanced data stewardship, scholarly collaboration, nanopublications, and knowledge-graph-based discovery. A professor at Leiden University Medical Center and a key founder of the FAIR data and GO FAIR movements, he has also led international research-data initiatives, served as CODATA president, and was knighted in 2024 for his scientific contributions.

His talk will focus on two parts:
1. FAIR as in Fully AI Ready: How machine-actionable data can serve as input for LLMs (and more advanced AI systems), and how FAIR-compliant conceptual models can be used to train AI models to reduce hallucinations. These conceptual models can also act as a plausibility filter for AI-generated output, contributing to more reliable results and supporting explainable AI (XAI).
2. How the LIFES Association brings stakeholders together: How LIFES connects a wide range of stakeholders, including AI companies, that are involved in these developments and/or are building the infrastructure and applications needed to support them.

17:30/ Talk 2 Tracking Mental Health Signals on Social Media with Local, Interpretable AI

Maryia Zhyrko - Maria is an MSc Computer Science student at Leiden University whose research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Clinical NLP, Computational Social Science, and Generative AI. Alongside her studies, she works as a Solutions Engineer, building scalable AI applications with LLM integrations and Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines.

Maryia will talk about DreamerNLplus, an interpretable local-AI framework for analysing social-media timelines to identify mental-health signals and changes over time. She will explain how rules, retrieval-augmented generation, and language models can be combined to produce more transparent, privacy-conscious insights while keeping sensitive data under local control.

18:00 - 20:00 - Drinks, snacks, and good conversation

📣 Free & open to the community

Are you happy to share with the community some interesting research project or innovation you are working on in the field of AI in Life Sciences during our Meetup - reach out to mmbrela@datapebbles.com

Space Leiden is a makerspace and hackerspace in the Leiden Lammenschans area. We aim to provide a place where everyone can work, meet, create, experiment, and socialize with like-minded people. It’s a blend of a makerspace, hackerspace, and bar—a community hub with tools, 3D printers, lasercutters, servers, and honeypots for tinkering, hacking, and exploring.

We provide equipment that’s too big, too expensive, or too specialized to have at home—so you can build, break, and learn without limits.

Not familiar with us yet? Drop by, and we’ll be happy to give you a tour and help you get oriented. Have any questions beforehand? You can reach us via Discord or on our social media channels.

October edition;

Reliability of our Streaming Pipelines; How we took Flink CDC completeness from 92% to 99.78% by Abhishek Jain
In data infrastructure, streaming pipelines capture every database change (inserts, updates, deletes) in real time to keep downstream systems in sync.
We thought ours were 92% reliable, until we realized our measurement was double-counting some changes, hiding actual data loss. Using Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs), unique tags for each database transaction, we achieved 99.78% completeness.
This talk covers the pitfalls of duplicate counting, how GTIDs exposed the gaps, and the steps we took to harden our Apache Flink pipelines.

Doors open at 19:00
Talk starts at 19:30

📅 Thursday, 15 October 2026 🕒 19:00 - 22:00
📍 Café De Keyzer, Kaiserstraat 2-4, Leiden (city center)
❣️ Upstairs