Forward Pass 📊 — Applied AI Builders at Time Out Market DUMBO
About the event
We're heading to the waterfront for this one.
Join us at Time Out Market in DUMBO — upstairs and on the rooftop — with panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline, Brooklyn Bridge, and the East River. An evening of conversation with the engineers, researchers, data scientists, and builders in NYC who are working on applied AI. From production ML systems and agentic workflows to quantitative methods and AI for financial data. No slides. No presentations. No pitches. Just good food, great views, honest conversation, and meeting the people in this city who care about the same hard problems you do — shipping AI that actually works in the real world.
Why we keep showing up:
The applied AI community in New York is massive but fragmented. The quant researchers are behind NDAs. The startup engineers are heads-down building. The ML platform teams are buried in infrastructure. The academics are publishing papers nobody in industry reads. The governance people are writing policies nobody in engineering follows. This group puts all of those people in the same room — and the conversations that come out of it are why people keep coming back.
Come with whatever you're building, whatever you're stuck on, or whatever problem you've been wrestling with this week. Bring your questions, your half-baked architectures, and your honest takes on what's actually working versus what's just demo magic. Whether you've been to every event or this is your first time — you'll fit right in.
What the evening looks like:
Show up. Grab food from any of the 15+ vendors on the ground floor — tacos, burgers, poke, pizza, dumplings, whatever you're in the mood for. Grab a drink from the bar. Head upstairs and find the group. If the weather's right we'll be on the rooftop with the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline behind us. Introduce yourself. Talk about what you're building, what stack you're using, what's breaking in production, and what problems keep you up at night.
Time Out Market is spacious, casual, and built for exactly this kind of gathering — enough room to move around and meet new people, relaxed enough to settle into a real conversation, and a backdrop that reminds you why you live in this city.
Who should come:
ML engineers, data scientists, AI researchers, platform engineers, quantitative researchers, financial engineers, product managers building AI products, startup founders, data engineers, students, and anyone in NYC who is serious about applied AI. Whether you're shipping agents at a startup, building ML infrastructure at a bank, researching deep learning for time series, or just trying to get your first model into production — you belong here.
What we talk about:
Agentic AI — orchestration, tool use, multi-agent systems, evaluation, and what it actually takes to run autonomous systems in production. LLMs in the real world — RAG architectures, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and the gap between what works in a notebook and what works at scale. AI for financial data — deep learning for time series, NLP on earnings calls and SEC filings, reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making, factor modeling, and backtesting methodology. Observability and governance — tracing, monitoring, model risk, compliance, and the oversight layer that determines whether your AI system is trustworthy. Infrastructure and engineering — data pipelines, feature stores, model serving, MLOps, and the unglamorous work that makes everything else possible. And whatever else comes up when you put a room full of builders together over food and drinks with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background.
A few notes: 🍕 15+ food vendors on the ground floor — grab whatever you want, pay for what you order. There's something for every budget and every diet. 🍸 Full bar available upstairs ⏰ Arrive when you can — the earlier you come, the more people you'll meet 🌇 If weather permits we'll be on the rooftop — dress accordingly 📍 Look for the NYC Applied AI Builders group…
