Basel Data Science & AI

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About us

The Basel Data Science & AI Community comes together to exchange knowledge, learn from practical experience, and connect across companies, academia, and disciplines.

Through meetups and community initiatives, we create space for thoughtful discussion around data science, machine learning, and AI: from established methods to emerging approaches and real-world applications.

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Upcoming events

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CHF 5.00
Basel Data Science & AI Meetup November 2026
Mon, Nov 23 · 6:30 PM CET
Ascent, Güterstrasse 144, Basel, CH
----------- Please register below -----------

The next Basel Data Science & AI meetup is coming soon, this time with three highly practical presentations around various aspects of ML / AI deployment.
Join us for another evening of inspiration, networking and building the local data science and AI community together. Looking forward to seeing you there!

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Agenda
18:30 - Arrival & mingling
19:00 - Talks (details below)
20:00 - Pizza, beers & networking

Talks
- Merve Selçuk Şimşek, Applied AI Scientist @ Institute for Data Science FHNW:
  How to Make Your Models More Efficient?
  As AI becomes increasingly widespread, the demand for computational resources and energy continues to rise, both during training and inference. Whether you're working with large or small models, generative AI or traditional machine learning, there are ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and minimise environmental impact.
  Merve holds a PhD in Computer Science and has spent the past decade working on making machine learning more efficient. In this talk, she will share practical approaches, real world examples, and the tradeoffs involved in improving model efficiency.
- Claudio von Planta-Thamboo, Staff Data & AI Engineer @ Swisscom: Turning Enterprise Knowledge into Action: AI Agents for Data Modernization
  How can AI accelerate data migration when the hardest work is understanding what already exists? Claudio von Planta-Thamboo will present his team’s approach to migrating a legacy data warehouse to a modern data platform on AWS. Their accelerator gives AI agents access to enterprise context through an ontology knowledge graph, helping them enrich metadata, align datasets with the established enterprise data model, and adapt legacy transformations and dashboards. Attendees will learn how knowledge graphs, human oversight, and reusable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools fit together in this architecture, and how work done for migration can lay the foundation for AI-first data engineering.
- Boas Loeb, CPO & Co-Founder @ AIcoach LTD:
  Less is more: Why our AI coach learned to forget
  For an AI coach, remembering what users said before is crucial - but remembering everything turns out to be the wrong goal. Boas Loeb, co-founder and chief product officer of AIcoach.chat, an AI coaching platform used by organisations such as NHS Elect, shares how his team built an elaborate memory system and then had to simplify it. Today their coach’s memory borrows from how human memory works and is shaped by what coaching conversations actually needs: it keeps mainly what is worth exploring in a future session, links what keeps coming up again and again, and regularly forgets and reorganises the rest. Attendees will learn why more memory often makes AI less helpful, how to derive memory decisions from their own use case, and practical lessons for anyone building or using AI that “knows” its users.
The commitment fee of 5 CHF helps reduce no-shows goes directly towards elevating our apéro with some pizzas 🍕. If you have any issue with the payment method, let me know and we can figure something out!

Thanks a lot to Acuity Analytics for hosting the meetup and to Machine Learning Architects Basel for supporting us and providing the Apéro!
18 attendees