Discover the Talks at PyCon Colombia 2026 ✨
Browse every accepted session—titles, tracks, levels, and speakers—before you plan your days in Medellín.
Machine Learning Applied to Genetic Sequences
DNA contains massive amounts of biological information, but how can artificial intelligence help us understand it? In this talk, we will explore how Python and Machine Learning can be used to analyze genetic sequences in a practical and beginner-friendly way. Using public biological datasets, we will demonstrate how DNA sequences can be transformed into data suitable for machine learning models, covering concepts such as feature extraction, sequence representation, and basic classification techniques. We will also review popular Python tools used in bioinformatics, including Biopython, pandas, and scikit-learn, while discussing real-world challenges when working with biological data, such as high dimensionality, noise, and interpretability limitations. By the end of the talk, attendees will have a clear understanding of how to start building genetic analysis projects using accessible tools from the Python ecosystem, even without prior bioinformatics experience.
Structured Learning: An AI-powered platform that transforms academic papers into interactive learning experiences.
Structured Learning: The AI Platform That Other AI Agents Build" Subtitle: A real platform that converts academic papers into interactive learning modules, built as a solo developer with an agent pipeline that takes every GitHub issue to a merged PR, on pure Python, async FastAPI, and AWS What do you do when you need to understand and implement a research paper, and existing tools force you to jump between five tabs — PDF viewer, ChatGPT, IDE, notes, a search engine — and every jump breaks context? And what happens when, on the other side of the problem, you're a solo developer trying to build something serious to solve it, with AI agents that usually work well in demos but fall apart in production? This talk is the engineering story of Structured Learning: a platform that converts a research paper into a complete learning module — chapter-by-chapter explanations, incremental executable code, RAG chat, FSRS spaced-repetition flashcards, equation derivations, and a Neo4j knowledge graph connecting concepts across the user's entire library. Nineteen of forty-two features delivered as a solo developer. The product is the visible half. The interesting half is how it was built. The first topic is the product. Where a static tool promises "upload the PDF, get a summary," Structured Learning accompanies the three phases of working with a paper — researching it, understanding it, and applying it — across four custom AI agents in async FastAPI and LiteLLM, with multi-provider support across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, and Ollama. The second topic is engineering: an agentic development workflow pipeline that takes a GitHub issue to a merged PR — planning, implementation, tests, review, automatic patching, conflict resolution, documentation, and release. Each phase runs in an isolated git worktree with its own port range, so agents actually run in parallel without checkout contention. Commands in GitHub comments (/plan, /patch, /conflict) trigger background workflows that post phase-by-phase progress back to the same issue, creating a human-readable audit trail. Adaptive routing sends trivial classification to fast, cheap models, and heavy review or debugging to stronger models. PR creation is deferred until all quality gates are green — unit tests, end-to-end tests, and review. When review finds blockers, the pipeline automatically launches a patch workflow to fix them in place and re-runs verification. Real self-repair, no human in the loop for the common "almost right" case. The third topic is production: how this runs on AWS without breaking, and how we develop it locally without paying for cloud. The entire stack — S3 for PDF uploads and TTS audio cache, ECS Fargate for FastAPI backend and GROBID service, RDS PostgreSQL 16 with pgvector extension consolidating application DB and vectors, Secrets Manager for credentials, ECR with immutable image promotion — lives on Terraform with per-environment directory separation. The key to maintaining dev↔prod parity is LocalStack plus a single variable (S3_ENDPOINT_URL): the same boto3 client runs identically on both sides, no code branches, no mocks in tests. docker compose up reproduces the full AWS topology locally, enabling end-to-end flows — paper upload, audio generation, caching — without real credentials or cloud costs during development. You'll leave with a clear view of the product — a platform that covers the three phases of working with an academic paper. For research, it offers conversational search over arXiv and OpenAlex, and a Neo4j graph that detects shared concepts, knowledge gaps, and optimal reading order across your entire library. For explanation, it generates chapter breakdowns with key concepts and diagrams, step-by-step equation derivations that demystify the math, RAG chat and Socratic mode that answers with the paper's full context, and an annotatable PDF reader with "Ask AI" on any selection. And for practical application, it produces executable code that builds incrementally with dependency tracking, FSRS flashcards for measurable long-term retention, and comprehension quizzes that validate understanding chapter by chapter. And with three concrete engineering recipes to reproduce in your own stack. One for building serious AI products without magic frameworks: typed contracts with Pydantic, SSE streaming with cancellation, prompt caching, and per-task cost accounting. Another for scaling a solo developer to team velocity by applying agentic discipline to your own development cycle: isolated worktrees, resumable pipelines, auto-patching after failed review, GitHub as the agents' API. And a third for eliminating "works on my machine" from AWS infrastructure using LocalStack as a local S3 mirror. The thesis: agents don't replace engineers, they replace the glue between engineers and the boring 80% of the SDLC — and that's where compound returns live.
Leverage your Python skill using the Python interpreter
In this talk, I'll challenge the audience's mindset about Python. Python is not an interpreter, and in fact, there are multiple Python interpreters—each with its own architecture and purpose. I'll walk through Python's core internals and show how programming languages interact beneath the surface. We'll explore how to write better Python by understanding the garbage collector, what you can build using the AST, how to read and leverage the disassembler, and the practical implications of Python's transition from its old LL(1) parser to the current PEG parser. We'll also dive into lesser-known features of Python interpreters, what a PEP really is and how it shapes the language, and conclude with a deep look at Python without the GIL—what changes, what breaks, and how the core team removed it. Throughout the talk, I'll share personal stories, including battles caused by identical ASTs and the moment I believed I had discovered a way to speed up the Python interpreter itself but...
hls4ml: From Python Models to Hardware Acceleration
This session presents a journey from developing machine learning models in Python to their implementation in hardware through the hls4ml tool. The goal is to show how models built in widely used frameworks such as TensorFlow, Keras, or PyTorch can be transformed into efficient hardware descriptions for deployment on reconfigurable devices. The complete workflow will be covered, including model preparation, conversion to High Level Synthesis (HLS) code, and the main hardware optimization criteria such as quantization and precision reduction. The trade-offs between latency, energy consumption, and model accuracy will also be discussed.
Jeronimo Lopez Gomez
Estudiante, Joven Investigador @ Universidad de Antioquia, Grupo de Instrumentacion Cientifica y Microelectronica
Natalia Echeverri Durán
Estudiante @ Universidad de Antioquia, Grupo de Instrumentacion Cientifica y Microelectronica
Building a Transformer with Rust
Transformers are often perceived as incomprehensible giants. This talk aims to prove the opposite: they are not black boxes but elegant mechanisms that can be understood and mastered from their fundamentals. We present Molinete AI, a GPT-2-style model built strictly from scratch in Rust. No deep learning frameworks—just tensors, math, and full control. Inspired by Feste from Tag1 Consulting (trained on Shakespeare), this project poses a different challenge: training the network on Miguel de Cervantes's work to generate text in the style of the Golden Age. Throughout the session we'll break the model down piece by piece. With the support of a Manim animated presentation (over 4,000 lines of code), we'll make visible how information flows inside the network. We'll start from tokenization (BPE) and building basic operations, then dive into the core of the model: embeddings, causal mask, and Multi-Head Self-Attention. Finally, we'll explore the learning process, watching how gradients flow through the network during training. More than a demo, this talk aims to provide a clear, operational view of Transformers, connecting theory with a real from-scratch implementation.
Python and Machine Learning for Sustainable Thermochemical Optimization
Chemical engineering still relies heavily on costly, slow experimental trials to evaluate operating conditions in thermochemical processes. This talk proposes a practical approach based on Python and machine learning to accelerate that process: building predictive models from physicochemical data that estimate key outcomes without testing every scenario in the lab. A complete flow oriented toward real applications will be shown, from data to decisions, with the goal of reducing analysis time, lowering experimental costs, and supporting process optimization with environmental impact.
