Vincent Caldeira
Leading Open Source Technology Innovation for a Sustainable Future
Singapore
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Vincent Caldeira, Red Hat APAC CTO and Industry Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, drives tech strategy and emerging engineering. A Top 10 APAC CTO (2023) with 20+ years in finance IT, he is an authority on open source, cloud-native technologies and AI. Vincent holds leadership roles across the Linux Foundation (FINOS, LF AI & Data) and GSF, championing AI safety, sustainability, and digital sovereignty.
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Stop Trusting a Black Box: The Economic Case for Open, Sovereign AI
As AI matures from a novelty into a strategic asset, 79% of organisations now prioritise sovereignty to mitigate vendor lock-in and secure critical data. Despite this, the market remains paralysed by a paradox: while open models have achieved performance parity with proprietary systems at a fraction of the cost, they remain massively under-utilised due to perceived friction and trust gaps.
This session dissects this market inefficiency, with insights from LF Research revealing how closed-source dominance is often driven by inertia rather than superior capability. We will explore how to operationalise true independence by rejecting "open-washing" in favour of rigorous frameworks that demand full model completeness: verifying everything from training data to weights. Join us to learn how to transition from renting black-box APIs to architecting a transparent, reproducible, and economically superior AI stack.
Stop Allocating GPUs, Start Delivering Intelligence:An Enterprise Blueprint for AI ROI on Kubernetes
For any enterprise, the high cost and chronic underutilization of GPUs is the single greatest threat to AI ROI. With one-third of cloud GPUs operating at less than 15% capacity, the key is to stop managing hardware and start delivering value.
This session presents a blueprint for transforming siloed GPU infrastructure into a centralized, high-yield "AI platform." We'll show why Kubernetes is the core economic engine that maximizes the return on your most expensive assets, not just a technical orchestrator. Learn how to:
Create a single, fungible GPU fabric to be shared across teams, boosting utilization.
Use intelligent autoscaling to match infrastructure spend to real-time demand.
Leverage vLLM and a new observability framework for distributed inference on kubernetes, llm-d, to manage performance SLOs (e.g., TTFT, TPS), giving you fine-grained control over token economics through tiered service offerings.
This blueprint is for platform engineers, MLOps leaders, and IT decision-makers aiming to justify AI spend and build an efficient foundation for innovation.
Operationalizing Agentic AI Safety & Evaluation for Multi-Agent Financial Systems
As financial AI shifts from passive models to autonomous agents, the industry faces a trust gap. Traditional "black box" validation is insufficient for systems executing complex workflows. This keynote explores the transition from MLOps to AgentOps, defining a standard for auditable Agentic AI where the decision process is as critical as the result.
We will dissect the FinSight Agent, a metacognitive FINOS Labs initiative built on LangGraph and MLflow, to demonstrate "Governance by Design." Aligning with the FINOS AI Evaluation Framework, we operationalize a "glass box" strategy. This moves beyond static benchmarks to implement trajectory tracing, where reasoning steps are audited against financial policies using LLM-as-a-Judge.
Finally, we cover system safety and supply chain security. We demonstrate how proactive Red Teaming detects risks like market manipulation and regulatory evasion. We also explore ensuring model integrity via the Model Openness Framework and Sigstore, proving open collaboration is key to building safe, compliant financial infrastructure.
Graph-Grounded Agentic Retrieval for Multi-Stage Reasoning over XBRL Financial Disclosures
The financial industry has long struggled to bridge the gap between standardized XBRL data and the nuanced reasoning needed for deep analysis. Traditional retrieval methods often treat complex disclosures as flat text, losing critical semantic relationships between line items, footnotes, and temporal periods.
This session introduces Graph-Grounded Agentic Retrieval. Using open-source tools like docling and docling-graph, we transform raw XBRL filings into hierarchical knowledge graphs that mirror the inherent structure of financial reporting. We also offer a data-driven demonstration of why graph-based approaches are superior for AI agents. Finally, as part of the FINOS AI Evaluation and Benchmarking stream, we use a rigorous framework to map the "reasoning trajectory" of agents navigating these graphs. Benchmarking against datasets like FinDER and FinAgentBench, we provide empirical evidence that grounding agents in document structure significantly reduces hallucinations and increases factual consistency over standard RAG.
The audience will leave with a blueprint for a verifiable, high-precision retrieval architecture for regulated financial content.
From Lab to Life: Practical AI System Evaluation
Agentic AI systems are a significant evolution from single-model GenAI Chatbots, but their dynamic and unpredictable nature in the real world introduces significant operational, reputational, and financial risks for enterprises. This "reality gap" is a critical blind spot that static, pre-deployment benchmarks like MMLU—with their fixed datasets—fail to address.
We propose a practical approach inspired by the framework suggested by the University of Michigan in their paper: "Evaluation Framework for AI Systems in the Wild".
The authors’ advocacy for holistic frameworks that integrate performance, fairness, and ethics can be seen as a foundation for a risk-adjusted evaluation. Their suggested use of continuous, outcome-oriented methods that combine human and automated assessments while also being transparent can increase trust among stakeholders.
We will break down the principles of the framework and provide practical, actionable approaches for a risk-adjusted evaluation using the best of open-source technologies. We will explore how to apply these evaluation methods throughout the entire AI system development lifecycle, from inception to continuous, real-world monitoring.
Engineering an Open-Source AML Detective: Local Graph Reasoning with SLMs and Edge AI
Financial institutions face a conflict between AML detection needs and data sovereignty. Cloud-based LLMs often struggle with the non-linear topologies of financial crime. This session presents a paradigm shift: an "AML Detective" agent for native graph reasoning on the edge, built with a 100% open-source stack.
We detail fine-tuning a 30B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model on the IBM AML Synthetic dataset. We show how Polars manages high-throughput transactions and NetworkX enables deterministic structural analysis. We explain our pivot from Reinforcement Learning (GRPO) to stable, process-driven Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using Unsloth for memory-efficient training on local hardware. Using MLflow for trajectory tracking, our hybrid-judge system increased detection success by 10% while reducing investigation steps in half and ensuring sensitive data remains local. Attendees will learn to orchestrate these tools to build privacy-compliant, metacognitive agents bridging graph theory and generative AI.
Decoding the open-source blueprint for India's sovereign AI future
As India transitions from being the world’s largest consumer of open-source software to a leading creator of digital public infrastructure, a new mandate has emerged: Sovereign AI. To achieve true digital autonomy, Indian enterprises and public institutions must build AI ecosystems that protect data residency, reflect local context, and avoid vendor lock-in. But how do we practically build this sovereign stack?
This session provides an end-to-end technical blueprint for building enterprise-grade sovereign AI infrastructure entirely on open-source technologies. Using a homegrown, production-ready AI coding assistant as a practical case study, we will deconstruct the architectural layers required for AI independence. We will explore how to orchestrate scalable infrastructure with OpenStack, abstract complex multi-vendor GPU environments using Kubernetes, and deploy high-throughput inference for open-weight models using vLLM.
Beyond the architecture, we will discuss how Indian firms can adopt this open-source stack to implement highly secure, air-gapped environments, protect intellectual property, and empower local engineering talent to shift from consuming global AI to building it.
Beyond Monolithic AI: Cloud-Native Patterns for Dynamic Model Selection and Semantic Routing
The era of the "one-size-fits-all" LLM is ending. We are shifting toward Compound AI Systems—complex meshes where the goal isn't just to query a model, but to dynamically select the best model for the specific task at hand. This shift creates a massive opportunity for cloud-native architectures: how do you govern non-deterministic routing at scale?
This session breaks down the infrastructure required to move from monolithic agents to multi-model orchestration. We will demonstrate how to implement Semantic Routing within an AI Gateway to act as a traffic controller, instantly analyzing user intent to route queries to the most capable (or cost-effective) model. You will learn patterns for "supervisor" workflows, where lightweight models handle routing and heavyweight models handle self-correction. Join us to discover how to build controlled AI systems on Kubernetes, ensuring your agents are not just powerful, but precise, effectively governed, and fundamentally safer.
Architecting Secure Agentic Workflows on Kubernetes: A Financial Sector Case Study
As organizations move beyond basic LLM integrations toward autonomous agentic workflows, the infrastructure required to support these systems grows increasingly complex. Running multi-agent architectures in production introduces unique challenges around tool discovery, secure access, and traffic routing.
This session explores how to leverage Kubernetes and cloud-native abstractions to develop, test, and deploy AI agents at scale. Using a reference architecture leveraging the Kagenti project, we will demonstrate how to construct a secure, scalable agentic environment. The talk covers unifying tool access via an MCP Gateway, enforcing zero-trust workload identity with SPIFFE/SPIRE, and standardizing inter-agent communication.
To illustrate these concepts, we will walk through a real-world financial use case: an autonomous agent that securely accesses market data and executes simulated transactions using financial tools over MCP, demonstrating end-to-end cloud-native deployment.
Applied GenAI in Action: A Shared Framework for Financial AI Evals and Benchmarking
"Can this system be trusted?" is the hardest question to answer for GenAI in finance. General-purpose benchmarks, often limited to the model (like MMLU) fail to capture the nuance of regulated tasks, forcing institutions to build proprietary evaluation silos. This session unveils the current effort within the FINOS AI Evaluation & Benchmarking workstream, as part of our Applied GenAI initiative. We will explore how the community is mapping real-world financial use cases directly to rigorous evaluation metrics.
In particular, the presentation will feature a technical overview of current state-of-the-art evaluation techniques for multi-agent systems leveraging the FinSight Agent, an open-source reference implementation for analyzing corporate earnings calls. This use-case allows us to demonstrate how to execute consistent, reproducible tests using open datasets and synthetic data pipelines.
Discover how your firm can stop guessing and start measuring AI performance against an industry-standard baseline.
AI Agents & Platform Engineering: Efficiency Boost or New Source of Trouble?
As application developers accelerate their output with AI-assisted coding tools, platform engineers face mounting pressure to keep pace. Can nondeterministic AI agents help bridge this gap, or are they a troublesome new source of complexity and unpredictability? What common challenges cause these AI initiatives to stall, and what does a “minimum viable” platform foundation for success actually look like? How do teams evaluate agent effectiveness and manage the cost implications of AI in production? How can platform engineers build trust in nondeterministic systems, and how does the human–agent collaboration model differ from traditional team dynamics?
This vendor-neutral KubeCon panel brings together platform engineering leaders, project creators, and technical experts to share practical insights on the real-world impact of AI agents in platform engineering, offering proven patterns for defining golden metrics, avoiding common pitfalls.
Sovereign AI in Action: Advancing India’s Digital Future with Open Source Infrastructure
India’s pursuit of Sovereign AI—the ability to build and run AI systems within national borders—is fast becoming a strategic imperative. This session explores how open source principles and infrastructure are accelerating India’s journey toward digital self-reliance, highlighting collaboration between local cloud providers and the open source community.
Discover how a leading Indian datacenter and cloud provider is building a sovereign cloud platform that supports AI aligned with India’s regulatory, cultural, and linguistic landscape. With scalable, GPU-powered infrastructure and open frameworks, this platform empowers enterprises to train and deploy AI models securely and responsibly.
We’ll also showcase community-driven approaches to model customization that reduce barriers for domain experts and enable more relevant, safer AI. Learn how open tooling supports transparent governance, data residency, and innovation across sectors—from finance to healthcare.
Join us to see how open ecosystems are shaping India’s inclusive, self-reliant AI future.
Operationalizing Openness: Standardizing AI Model Supply Chains with the Model Openness Framework
As AI systems proliferate, ensuring transparency, trust, and traceability across the model supply chain has become a critical challenge. The Model Openness Framework (MOF), developed by LF AI & Data and Generative AI Commons, offers a standardized classification system to evaluate the completeness and openness of AI models across 17 key components—from architecture to evaluation code and documentation. This talk will explore how the MOF addresses model "openwashing" and supply chain risk by establishing clear standards for licensing and disclosure. We will demonstrate how enterprises can operationalize MOF compliance using open source tools like OCI-based model packaging, model signing, and automated documentation pipelines. Attendees will gain practical insights into aligning with emerging governance requirements and building trustworthy, reproducible AI systems through open collaboration.
Multi-Layered Guardrails for Cloud-Native AI: Enforcing Compliance and Safety at Scale
As AI-powered cloud-native applications evolve, ensuring trust, compliance, and robustness requires dynamic governance mechanisms that operate seamlessly across distributed environments. This keynote introduces a multi-layered cloud-native framework that enforces AI guardrails at three critical stages: pre-processing (input validation), inference (real-time bias mitigation), and post-inference (output validation).
By leveraging Kubernetes orchestration, Istio service mesh, and knowledge graphs, the framework enables scalable AI governance that integrates multi-agent coordination, real-time intervention, and traceability to ensure AI decisions remain transparent, auditable, and aligned with compliance requirements.
Attendees will gain insights into cloud-native AI governance patterns, practical deployment strategies, and the role of multi-agent oversight in ensuring compliant, production-ready AI workflows within Kubernetes environments.
From Containers to Cognitive Agents: Open Source Foundations for Enterprise-Grade AI Systems
As AI evolves from isolated model development to system-level deployments, enterprise AI engineers face increasing complexity in tooling, governance, and operational workflows. This session explores how open source technologies—Podman Desktop, RamaLama, and Llama Stack—can streamline the design and delivery of secure, scalable, and reproducible agentic AI systems. Attendees will follow an end-to-end user journey: starting from secure container-based local experimentation, advancing through modular multi-agent RAG workflows, and culminating in OCI-compliant model packaging and Kubernetes-native deployment. We’ll dive into practical strategies for integrating model governance via the LF AI & Data Model Openness Framework, achieving robust supply chain security, and enabling observability across the AI lifecycle. Whether you're building internal AI platforms or modernizing MLOps, this session reveals how open tooling empowers teams to confidently operationalize next-gen AI systems at enterprise scale.
Scaling AI Responsibly: Building Ethical, Sustainable, and Cloud-Native AI Systems
Panel Discussion - As AI continues to reshape industries, organizations face mounting pressure to scale AI systems responsibly while addressing challenges in efficiency, sustainability, and trust. This panel convenes leading experts to discuss how cloud-native technologies and CNCF projects are paving the way for scalable, ethical, and resource-efficient AI. Attendees will gain actionable insights into optimizing AI workflows, reducing environmental impact, and ensuring transparency in AI decision-making. From leveraging open-source tools to implementing cost-effective and ethical AI practices, this session will equip you with the knowledge to build AI systems that are both innovative and responsible. Discover how to harness the power of cloud-native ecosystems to drive AI transformation without compromising on sustainability or trust.
AI/ML engineers and data scientists looking to scale AI systems in cloud-native environments.
OS-Climate: A Data-Driven Open Source Approach to Climate-Aligned Finance Investing
LF OS-Climate (OS-C) is a breakthrough initiative creating a transparently governed public utility of open data and open source tools for climate-aligned finance investing, business, and regulation. This session explores the launch of a global open-source collaboration to create the most potent tool for data-driven decisions in transition strategies, investments, new technologies, and policies. We will present OS-C's comprehensive technical infrastructure and methodologies, fostering the development of open data products that address the challenges of climate transition. A critical focus will be the Data Mesh architecture, pivotal for federating diverse climate data sources and achieving Net Zero objectives. Additionally, we'll introduce a new open data product, essential for financial institutions to disclose quantitatively the degree of alignment/non-alignment to Paris goals of the $87 Trillion in sovereign bonds making up about a third of all pension fund and insurance investments globally, a vital step for the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance (AOA) and Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) members towards realigning commitments to Net Zero.
Trust in Green: Towards a Cloud Native Approach for Building Sustainable and Reliable Enterprise AI
As organisations increasingly integrate AI solutions, the demand for environmentally sustainable practices within this space has never been more critical. This presentation delves into the collaborative effort between the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) AI WG and the TAG Environmental Sustainability to define a repeatable design approach aimed at fostering sustainable AI in cloud-native environments. Our discussion will outline the crucial considerations in such approach, including efficient management of compute resources, storage optimisation, and advanced networking solutions. Attendees will gain insights into the lifecycle of AI/ML deployments, from inception through operation, emphasising resilience, scalability, and resource efficiency. By highlighting innovative "green" strategies, this session will provide actionable best practices and recommendations, alongside a forward-looking perspective on future trends and research directions in sustainable AI.
Green AI in Cloud-Native Ecosystems: Strategies for Sustainability and Efficiency
The rapid proliferation of AI is increasing focus on the environmental costs associated with large-scale model training and deployment. As cloud-native technologies form the backbone of modern AI systems, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is spearheading efforts to balance AI innovation with sustainability. This session will provide an overview of the CNCF effort to identify key areas, techniques, and best practices for energy-efficient AI in cloud-native environments. Attendees will gain insights into a newly developed taxonomy that categorises remediation patterns and sustainable practices across AI lifecycle phases, deployment environments, and personas.
We will also explore real-world applications and discuss reference architectures that provide means to optimise resource use, such as GPU slicing for inference efficiency, power capping during training, and carbon-aware scheduling, while maintaining performance and scalability.
OS-Climate and Unity Catalog: Pioneering Open Source ESG Data Sharing
In the rapidly evolving landscape of ESG data, financial institutions face the dual challenges of data fragmentation and security. This session will explore OS-Climate's innovative use of open source technologies, including Apache Iceberg, Apache Spark and the Unity Catalog, the industry's only universal catalog for data and AI, to enable secure and efficient ESG data sharing across financial institutions. Through this session, participants will gain insights into the strategic benefits of leveraging open source tools for ESG data management, including enhanced data security, governance, and interoperability. In particular we will demonstrate how Unity Catalog Unity's multimodal interface supporting various data formats and engines supports compatibility across diverse data ecosystems to facilitate seamless integration and governance of data assets, allowing financial institutions to not only meet regulatory compliance but also to harness ESG data for strategic advantage.
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