GenAI and unlocking opportunities

Dear Data Enthusiasts,

Join us once again at Crayon on the 5th of December to dive deeper into the current world of GenAI.

Beyond Stable Diffusion: Breaking New Ground in AI Image Generation 2024 In just two years, AI image generation has evolved from a niche research topic to a technology that’s reshaping creative industries worldwide, enabling anyone to manifest their imagination with a simple text prompt. While early models struggled with basic compositions and human anatomy, today’s systems can create photorealistic imagery, complex scenes, and even maintain consistent characters across multiple generations. Beyond the widely known Stable Diffusion and DALL-E models, a new wave of architectural innovations is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible - from lightning-fast one-shot generation to remarkably compact models that run on consumer hardware. These advancements aren’t just incremental improvements; they represent fundamental shifts in how we approach image synthesis, using breakthrough concepts like flow matching, diffusion transformers, and linear attention mechanisms. In this talk, we’ll explore these developments that are setting the stage for the next generation of AI image creation, making it faster, more efficient, and more accessible than ever before.

Mouhannad Ali, PhD, Senior ML Engineer Mouhannad is an AI and machine learning expert with over 15 years of experience in academia and industry. His work spans transportation, healthcare, and financial services, focusing on AI/ML applications and product development. With a strong track record of innovation, he has led impactful projects in both research and industry, solving complex real-world challenges with advanced data science techniques.

Julius Duin, ML Engineer Intern Julius started their journey in psychology and computer science before diving into neuroscience, bringing a unique perspective to technology and human behavior. After co-founding a fitness tech startup focused on motion tracking in gyms, he discovered another passion at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning. Today, he’s an ML engineer who’s particularly fascinated by computer vision and robotics, drawing interesting parallels between artificial systems and their neuroscience background.

Shaping the future: unlocking opportunities with the generation of synthetic data While machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) offer transformative potential, a significant barrier remains: access to quality data. GDPR compliance adds complexity, limiting the availability of real-world datasets essential for training robust algorithms. Synthetic data presents a powerful solution to safely share data and comply with GDPR. In this talk, we’ll explore how we set up a Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) to generate synthetic load profiles. By simulating realistic energy consumption patterns without compromising privacy, we’ve been able to create high-quality, compliant data that fuels AI models. These synthetic load profiles are crucial for optimizing energy usage, helping to drive significant improvements in energy efficiency across buildings.

Philipp Mascherbauer, PhD student at Technical University of Vienna Philipp is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Energy Economics Group (EEG), which he joined in August 2020 after earning his master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from TU Wien. His work centers on modeling energy demand in European residential buildings, with a particular focus on the impact of the rising share of prosumers in the sector.

Francesca Conselvan, Researcher at e-think energy research Francesca is what we can actually call a data science enthusiast. She has a cross-disciplinary background, which spans from research evaluation and publishing to artificial intelligence. In the past 8 years, she has been working as a data analyst and holds several collaborations in data science. At e-think she is responsible for data analysis, prediction models and generation of synthetic data.

! Note that admission is based on an RSVP list and this is a small and cozy event limited to 25 places! Please make sure that you RSVP and that you have a human-like name set up on Meetup.com :)

🎤🎤 Open Mic We are going to open up the stage after the talks for community announcements. If you’d like to announce something, open this slide deck, make sure you are signed in with a google account, and click “View Only” -> “Request Edit Access”. Explain in the text box what you want to announce, and we’ll give you edit access to the slide deck. 🎤🎤

Following the presentations, enjoy snacks, drinks, and great conversation.

Attention attendees with food allergies. Please be aware that the food and drinks provided may contain or come into contact with common allergens, such as dairy, eggs, wheat, soybeans, tree nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, or wheat.

Please note that during the event, photos might be made and later posted on VDSG’s. Please notify us if you do not agree.

Best, Your Vienna Data Science Group Team