Events for October 13, 2026

Part of the 11th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC 2026) Location: Santa Clara University | Date: Oct 13-15, 2026 Overview The future of the Edge is not just decentralized—it must be sustainable. As AI models grow in complexity, the environmental and energetic costs of deploying them on edge devices have become a critical bottleneck. The Minimalist Edge AI Challenge invites student teams to tackle the "AI Bloat" head-on. This one-day competition challenges you to take state-of-the-art "heavy" models and transform them into lean, green, high-performance machines capable of running on constrained, eco-friendly hardware. Can you maintain intelligence while slashing the carbon footprint? Join our Discord group for latest updates (https://discord.gg/V29ZXCTFR5). --------------------------------------------------------------- The Challenge Participating teams will be tasked with deploying a complex AI workload (e.g., real-time multi-object tracking or environmental anomaly detection) onto provided low-power hardware (Qualcomm Arduino UNO Q). Your mission is to optimize for the "Green Trifecta": - Model Accuracy: Maintain high predictive performance and reliability while operating under strict resource constraints. - Model Compression: Use pruning, quantization, and distillation to shrink the model footprint. - Resource Efficiency: Minimize peak RAM and CPU utilization to ensure smooth execution on minimalist hardware. - Energy Parsimony: Achieve the lowest possible Joules-per-inference to maximize battery life and sustainability. --------------------------------------------------------------- Why Participate? - Showcase Your Skills: Pitch your solution to a jury of world-leading edge computing experts from academia and industry. - Build Your Career & Network: Pitch your solution to a premier jury of world-leading edge computing experts and recruiters from academia and industry giants like Qualcomm. - Engineer for Planet Earth: Move past theoretical AI. Help define the actual benchmarks for "Green AI" and create real-world impact by building hyper-efficient, eco-friendly edge computing models. - Cash Prizes: The top three teams from each track will receive cash rewards: - 1st Place: $1,000 - 2nd Place: $750 - 3rd Place: $500 - Participant Perks: All competition participants will receive IEEE Computer Society swag and a free IEEE Computer Society Student Membership (Note: Requires an active IEEE Student Membership). --------------------------------------------------------------- Eligibility & Team Composition - Open to all undergraduate and graduate students registered at a recognized university. - Teams should consist of 2 to 4 members. - Recommended Skill Set: * Proficiency in Python (PyTorch/TensorFlow) and/or C++/Rust. - Experience with model optimization techniques (Pruning, Quantization). - Knowledge of Linux systems and resource profiling. - A passion for sustainable engineering. --------------------------------------------------------------- Important Dates ● Team Registration Deadline: Sept. 6th, 2026 ● Competition Day: Oct. 13-16 (Co-located with SEC 2026) Co-sponsored by: QualComm 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, California, United States, 95053

ACM/IEEE SEC 2026 and the 14th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E 2026) will be held together at Santa Clara University. Attendees may participate in technical sessions from either conference, and both communities will come together for a joint poster and demo session. SEC is a forum for top researchers, engineers, students, entrepreneurs, and government officials come together under one roof to discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise from rethinking cloud computing architectures and embracing edge computing. SEC takes a broad view of edge computing and solicits contributions from many fields of systems practice that embrace any aspect of edge computing. Bldg: Benson Memorial Center, 820 Alviso St, , Santa Clara University, Santa Clara , California, United States, 95050

Stanford IEEE is hosting a live on-campus taping of "A Bit Personal," the Global Semiconductor Alliance's podcast. GSA CEO Jodi Shelton sits down with John Hennessy, Stanford President Emeritus and Chairman of Alphabet, to talk about his career in computer architecture, leading Stanford, and the future of the semiconductor industry. Tuesday, October 13, 12-1 PM. Free and open to Stanford students, staff, and faculty. Details and RSVP: https://luma.com/x4vhq2eq Co-sponsored by: Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) Room: 101X, Bldg: Paul G. Allen Building, 420 Via Palou, Stanford, California, United States, 94305

This is an online event. Pre-registration is required. Trusted adoption of an AI solution in an enterprise setting has many requirements. Large Language Models (LLMs) can often be constrained by the risks of hallucination bias and limited operational trust and reliability. Overcoming these challenges requires models whose output is fully grounded, auditable, and accurate. In addition, enterprise policy compliancy is critical in highly regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, legal, insurance, government, and critical infrastructure. This presentation will discuss a solution framework with open-source models that can be systematically adapted using a combination of post-training optimization with advanced and agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to create a production-ready enterprise LLM architecture. Advanced RAG is able to strengthen factual grounding through hybrid retrieval, metadata filtering, reranking, citation generation, and context optimization. Agentic RAG is able to extend this capability by enabling planner, retriever, verifier, and critic agents to decompose complex tasks, iteratively retrieve evidence, validate sufficiency, re-query when needed, and produce auditable answers suitable for enterprise production use. Speaker(s): Prasad Venkatachar, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/577393