SF Systems: Research to Practice, from Inference Engines to Multimodal Coding
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Talks & recordings
5 connected sessions
Domain Specific LLM Inference for AI-SQL
Shreya Shankar on serving LLMs for database-style operations. She is introduced as a researcher in databases and human-AI interaction who built DocETL, an open-source system for processing unstructured data, during her EECS PhD at UC Berkeley, and who joins CMU as an assistant professor in 2027. The talk starts from what AI has become good at: the basic text operations NLP has worked on for decades -- extraction, classification, summarization -- which models have handled passably for a while but only recently handle zero-shot, so nobody has to collect training data first. From there into the inference question that follows once those operations are run at database scale.
LatchBio: engineering for biology
A two-minute pitch from LatchBio, the meetup's host, delivered in the gap before the talks. The argument: biology is one of the most important and most enjoyable domains to work in, for its impact on human health as much as its interest, and bespoke scientific workflows can be decomposed and made verifiable -- chunked up, with rewards constructed from each chunk's domain and context. On that approach LatchBio has published benchmarks across drug development, molecular measurement and biosecurity at benchmarks.bio. The recruiting pitch is a small team of engineers embedded with a large team of scientists, alongside drug hunters and biotech founders, with access to real wet-lab data; and the infrastructure built over four years for biology -- FUSE drivers, container orchestration, distributed file systems -- now repurposed to evaluate agents at a scale the speaker is careful to say is evaluation rollouts rather than an inference business. The speaker is not named on camera.
Notes from the SF Systems Club, September 2026
Alexy Khrabrov's note from the floor of the SF Systems Club meetup of 24 September 2026, hosted by LatchBio. The club is organised by Shadaj Laddad -- a long-time speaker at the Scala, Scale By the Bay and AI By the Bay meetups Alexy ran, who took his PhD at UC Berkeley and is now at AWS -- and Alexy's verdict on the evening is that it was a fantastic meetup.
Opening the SF Systems Club
Shadaj Laddad opens the SF Systems Club meetup. The club's goal is a community of people excited about systems broadly -- compilers, distributed systems, programming languages, embedded systems -- fields of computer science and engineering that share a great many principles, with the focus kept on core engineering: no fluff, no marketing, here to learn things. This meetup in particular sets out to connect the Bay Area's engineering and research communities, which he says do not talk to each other often enough, with a night of talks showing research making its way into the real world. He names the organisers -- Chris, Conor, Jeff, Neil and himself -- invites anyone with a large space to host a future meetup or a proposal to submit a talk, and thanks LatchBio for the space and the food.
Shadaj Laddad and Chris Wensel, SF Systems Club - Interview with Alexy
Shadaj Laddad and Chris Wensel, two of the SF Systems Club's organisers, interviewed by Alexy Khrabrov at the meetup. Alexy's history with Shadaj runs back to 2011, when Shadaj gave his first talk as a child at the Scala meetup Alexy had just started in the Bay Area; both his parents were long-time speakers there too, which Alexy and Shadaj agree makes it a family business. Shadaj works at the interface of functional programming and distributed systems, and now AI, and leads the Hydro team at AWS. Chris Wensel is the creator of Cascading.
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