Program

Powering the Open-Source AI Movement
December 9 - 10, 2025

Beach Rotana, Abu Dhabi

8:30 AM - 9:00 AM Registration
9:00 AM - 9:10 AM Welcome Note Dr. Hakim HacidChief ResearcherTechnology Innovation Institute
9:10 AM - 9:30 AM Opening Ceremony & Address Dr. Najwa AarajChief Executive OfficerTechnology Innovation Institute
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM AI, Open Source, and Importance of Collaboration Talk #1: Update on the NVIDIA - TII Collaboration: First Wave of Results
 Dr. Adam Henryk Grzywaczewski Nvidia
Talk #2: Open Source AI for a Linguistically Diverse World Dr. Jean Maillard Meta
10:45 AM - 11:00 AM Networking and coffee break
11:00 AM - 12:45 PM Agentic AI Talk #3: Reimagining Enterprise Services Through Language Models, Agent Automation Middleware, and Quality Control AI Prof. Boualem Benatallah Dublin City University
Talk #4: Using Tools and Agents to Overcome Model Boundaries Dr. Kareem Darweesh Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)
Talk #5: Beyond the Cloud: How Alibaba Fuels the Open Source Engine Sida LiuAlibaba Cloud
12:45 PM - 2:00 PM Lunch
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM AI Governance and Evaluation Talk #6: AI, Open Source, and the SDGs: Building a System of Systems for Global Good Dr. Mehdi Snene United Nations
Talk #7: Rethinking the “evaluation” of AI–powered systems Dr. Fabio Casati ServiceNow
3:15 PM - 3:30 PM Networking and coffee break
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM Foundation Models and Machine Learning Talk #8: Apertus: The Transparent & Sovereign Open Source Swiss LLM Prof. Daniel Dobos SwissCom
Talk #9: EuroLLM: A Family of Encoders and Decoders for Europe Prof. Pierre Colombo University Paris Sacaly
4:45 PM - 5:30 PM Panel discussion Sovereignty through Open Source AI: Perspectives, Challenges, Enablers, and Benefits. Dr. Chaouki Kasmi Moderator Dr. Victor MateauPanelist Dr. Abed BenaichouchePanelist Khalifa AlkaabiPanelist
6:30 PM - 9:00 PM GALA DINNER
9:00 AM - 10:45 AM Infra and next generation AI Models Talk #10: MaxText: Achieving Simplicity and Top-Tier Performance for LLM Training with JAX
 Newfel Harrat Google
Talk #11: Open-Source Data & Tools for AI Model Development Dr. Petros Zerfos IBM
Talk #12: Toward foundation models for neuro-technologies,: real-time neural decoding with hybrid state-space models Prof. Guillaume Lajoie MILA
10:45 AM - 11:00 AM Networking and coffee break
11:00 AM - 12:45 PM Contributions to AI in GCC Talk #13: How Spotify builds with and for the open source community Dr. Mounia Lalmas Spotify
Talk #14: The Triple Helix of Cultural Fit in LLMs: The Aim, The Facts, and The Complex Reality Dr. Ahmed Abdelali HUMAIN
Talk #15: Scaling Reasoning Efficiently with Hybrid Models Dr. Mohamed SeddikTII
12:45 PM - 2:00 PM Light Lunch
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM Beyond The Models Talk #16: Why do we need a sovereign infrastructure to run Open Source LLMs? (Online talk) David GurleHivenet
Talk #17: Transforming Metabolomics Through Machine Learning and Generative AI: From Automated Workflows to Precision Medicine Applications Prof. Jacques Corbeil MILA
3:15 PM - 3:30 PM Networking and coffee break
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM New Architectures Talk #18: The Salamandra Family: Advancing Open Foundation Models through Pre-Training and Post-Training recipes. Dr. Daniel Tamayo Mela BSCC
Talk #19: Falcon-H1: A Family of Hybrid-Head Language Models Redefining Efficiency and Performance Dr. Maksim Velikanov TII
Talk #20: Why Agentic AI Is Moving Fastest in the Open Laith Al-Saadoon AWS
5:30 PM - 5:45 PM Closing Remarks