Nov92025

CAIML #39

Meetup Cologne

 

The 39th community meetup of Cologne AI ML (i.e. CAIML) took place on November 4th at REWE digital GmbH. We were delighted to welcome over 70 AI and ML enthusiasts to this year’s last CAIML meeting and to spend an evening with them filled with interesting presentations and inspiring discussions.

 

Venue

The CAIML no. 39 meetup took place at REWE digital GmbH. We would like to thank our sponsor for the delicious food and drinks provided by REWE digital.

Welcome & Intro

As always, the CAIML meetup was moderated brilliantly and confidently by Fabian Hadiji. The evening featured two presentations, followed by social networking among the AI enthusiasts in attendance.

First Talk

Juri Wiens, AI Research Engineer at REWE digital:

One Voice, Many Minds: Engineering Voice-First Multi-Agent Systems

“In settings where hands are busy, voice first agentic systems promise autonomous, goal oriented assistance and often need to scale as distributed multi agent architectures for extensibility, including remote agents. There is an option space, but this talk focuses on real time APIs backed by speech to speech models. We show how stateful, bidirectional audio shapes latency budgets, session state, observability, and orchestration. We outline patterns for coordinating heterogeneous agents, text and real time, in process and remote via A2A, behind a single conversational voice. Attendees leave with concise design principles, key tradeoffs, and pitfalls to avoid when scaling from one voice to many minds.”

Second Talk

Ole Bialas, Research Software Consultant at University of Bonn:

What is “neural” about artificial neural networks? On the differences and similarities between artificial and biological intelligence

“While, historically, the field of AI was strongly influenced by neuroscience and cognitive psychology, recent breakthroughs came predominantly from innovations in engineering. However, with traditional scaling laws seeing diminishing returns and models running out of new data to train on, the time seems particularly ripe to turn to neuroscience for inspiration. In my talk, I’ll present recent research on similarities and differences between human brains and artificial neural networks. For example, deep networks trained on object recognition remarkably predict neural responses across the primate visual system, with different layers corresponding to different stages of cortical processing. Yet important differences remain: while both humans and ANNs learn to categorize images, humans organize categories primarily by semantic and functional relationships, whereas ANNs rely more heavily on perceptual similarity. These comparisons inevitably raise larger philosophical questions about intelligence and agency in biological organisms and artificial systems. While I won’t be able to give conclusive answers, I hope to provide the audience with a new lens through which to view these questions.”

Poll

Prompt engineering is a long term skill OR a temporary hack?

Video impressions

Fabian launching the meetup

Juri presenting his talk

Ole presenting his talk

Further information

CAIML aims to bring together people interested in AI and ML (machine learning). For more information visit & join us:

CAIML Mission

“We want to bring people together who are interested in AI and Machine Learning. At our meetups, we have: networking, talks, fireside chats, knowledge exchange and applications of AI and Machine Learning. We organize our meetups every other month at different locations in Cologne. We are always looking for innovative and inspiring speakers. If you know somebody who would be an excellent fit for our meetup, we would highly appreciate if you help us and recommend this speaker to us.”

LinkedIn

Please follow our CAIML community also on Linkedin:

Slides

Juri and Ole were kind enough to share their presentations with us:

Networking

As usual, the two talks and discussions were followed by a personal networking round with food and drinks, sponsored by REWE digital. Many thanks also to Aaqib, Fabian and Marc for once again organizing an excellent event with well-chosen topics and outstanding speakers.

Next meetup

Join us on January 20th, 2026 at Nandu, Richmodstraße 31 in Cologne: www.meetup.com/CAIML/40

Retrospective

Don’t miss the previous meetups of the CAIML community in Cologne:

Beyond the Hype Cycle – AI agents

RAG & autonomous research machines

Forecasts and Smart Mobility

AI act & state space models

Is the AI hype over?

Host a future meetup

Categories: Deep Technology, Industrie, Innovation
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Author: Dr. Thomas Fabula

Thomas Fabula applies his profound experience in various functions for multinational corporations and medium-sized enterprises in different branches. As a former athlete his passion for sportive leadership enables him to motivate intercultural & cross-disciplinary teams in business environments to high-performance level.