Graph Exchange, May 2025
We at Neo4j have a tradition to host a Graph Gathering, a chamber event for the global thought leaders in graphs and AI. It’s a special day run as an unconference. There are usually two, one in the Spring, one in the Fall. In 2024, I’ve attended the Spring one as a dinner guest, and the Fall one all day as a new node.
This Spring, the stars have not aligned for the traditional gathering, and we decided to try something new — a public conference+unconference!
I’ve put together the program from the speakers of Bay Area AI meetups and top local conferences, as well as the stars of Graph AI. June Leskovec of Stanford and Kumo launched the first Relational Foundation Model that Kumo uses to predict the future from tabular data.
Jure Lescovec
Rishi Puri of Nvidia talked about Graph Transformers in PyG, the open-source framework started at Stanford by Jure’s group. Jure runs the Stanford Graph Learning workshop where I met Rishi as he copresented with our Neo4j colleague Zach.
Rishi Puri
Nikita Ivanov showed AI Workers — ushering in the era of Hirable AI and Software-Defined Workforce. Let’s mark the moment in time when we heard this phrase first!
Nikita Ivanov
Alexy Khrabrov, the AI Community Architect at Neo4j, presented OAKS ASKG — the Agent-Server Knowledge Graph from the OAKS project, aiming to catalog all the MCP servers for agents workflows.
Alexy Khrabrov
The second part, that we tried for the first time, was inspired by my very first Scala for Startups meetup in August 2011. I had about 30 people in a small startup office on Townsend, and gathered them in a circle. We split into two breakout sessions, inspired by Storage and Compute:
- AI Memory
- AI Reasoning
Steve Chin, our VP DevRel, lead the Memory one, and I moderated the Reasoning.
We ran each as an unconference with postits presented by speakers and voting on the order. In the end, we reconvened in a plenary session with the key insights from the breakouts presented by the moderator and a leading contributor from each. I chose Rishi for mine as he answered each problem with detailed advice and a recommendation to use a combination of Kumo, Nvidia, PyG, or all of the above!
Overall it was an intense technical rodeo with folks keeping attention for 4 hours and staying mostly silent during talks and manageable noise in breakouts and over pizza!
Photos by Alexy Khrabrov: https://alexy-khrabrov.smugmug.com/Meetups/Graph-Exchange/Graph-Exchange-20250521