What's happening: Week of 27 July 2026
Tashfeen Ahmed (Microsoft) · Shiv Rajappa (Mastercard) + 1 more
AI Tinkerers Dublin returns with a screened, demos-first builder night sponsored by Toast — no pitch decks, just technical show-and-tell on generative AI and agentic workflows. Five-minute deep dives are…
Daniel M. Kuchta (NVIDIA)
AI workloads are breaking the interconnect. As models scale, the bottleneck moves off the chip and onto the wire — and co-packaged optics is the industry's answer. Daniel M. Kuchta,…
The regular Dublin Tech Social mixer at The Bleeding Horse on Camden Street — afterwork drinks and networking for tech workers across engineering, AI, data, product, cybersecurity and IT. An…
with Daniel M. Kuchta (Principal Hardware System Architect, IEEE Fellow, NVIDIA)
AI workloads are breaking the interconnect. As models scale, the bottleneck moves off the chip and onto the wire — and co-packaged optics is the industry's answer. Daniel M. Kuchta, Principal Hardware System Architect at NVIDIA and an IEEE Fellow, gives the guest lecture in the CONNECT Visiting Lecturer Series at Trinity College Dublin. He covers the state of co-packaged optical transceiver technology across both VCSEL and silicon-photonics approaches, how they fit the evolving Ethernet switch and computer I/O landscape, and what large-scale AI is doing to the performance, scalability and energy-efficiency requirements of modern data centres. Kuchta spent three decades at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center on optical interconnect, holds 40+ patents and 145+ publications, and chaired OFC. An hour with someone genuinely at the frontier of how AI infrastructure actually gets built — rare in Dublin, and free.
with Tashfeen Ahmed (Senior Product Designer, Microsoft) · Shiv Rajappa (Product Manager, Mastercard) · Paula Ribeiro (Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead, Toast)
AI Tinkerers Dublin returns with a screened, demos-first builder night sponsored by Toast — no pitch decks, just technical show-and-tell on generative AI and agentic workflows. Five-minute deep dives are followed by a hands-on "science fair" for walking through code and getting live feedback. Confirmed demos include Tashfeen Ahmed (Microsoft) on building a free-LLM API, Shiv Rajappa (Mastercard) on Compountier, and Paula Ribeiro (Toast) on a marketing agent. Attendance is screened and capped at 150 — one of the highest-signal AI rooms in Dublin.