# Welcome to the third installment of the "AI Plumbers" DevRoom! We are bringing together the developers working on the essential "plumbing" of the AI industry: hardware accelerators, compilers and math kernel libraries, model quantization techniques, inference runtimes and servers, fine-tuning and training engines, edge and physical AI, distributed and rack-scale computing, and more. Together, we will spend the day discussing core designs and collaborating to solve governance problems. We are especially interested in recursive use of AI Plumbing: IOW if you happen to work on your AI Plumbing project agentically (or you're working on open source agentic harnesses) we'd love to hear from you! The AI Plumbers DevRoom started life in 2025 as the "Low-level AI Engineering and Hacking" DevRoom, and took its current name in 2026. We aspire for this DevRoom to become as important to the AI community as the Linux Plumbers Conference is to the Linux community. This year we are delighted to welcome new co-organizers from Hugging Face, Red Hat and Roofline AI, alongside the organizers from previous years. tl;dr; ====== The Devroom will be held on Sunday, 31st of January 2027 in Brussels, Belgium. We are accepting English language, in-person talks only. All sessions will be recorded. The submission deadline for talk proposals is November 30th, 2026 AoE. Key dates (time is always assumed to be Anywhere on Earth: AoE): * Call for Papers opens: November 2nd, 2026 * Submission deadline: November 30th, 2026 * Announcement of selected talks: December 5th, 2026 * Overall FOSDEM Schedule published: December 7th, 2026 * Conference dates: Saturday and Sunday, 30-31st of January 2027 * AI Plumbers Devroom: January 31st, 2027 Key links * [Official FOSDEM talk submission platform](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp) * [AI Plumbers DevRoom landing page](https://aifoundry.org/fosdem-2027-ai-plumbers-dev-room) What is FOSDEM? =============== FOSDEM is one of the world´s largest gatherings of Free Software contributors and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2027, it will be held on Saturday and Sunday, 30-31st of January 2027. Our call for papers is now open! With over 8500 participants, FOSDEM is the perfect place to share your story and meet fellow AI plumbers. Key things to know about FOSDEM: * FOSDEM is free to attend. There is no registration. Just show up! * [FOSDEM website](https://fosdem.org/2027/) * [FOSDEM code of conduct](https://fosdem.org/2027/practical/conduct/) What is the AI Plumbers DevRoom? ================================ This DevRoom is a celebration of Open Source low-level AI projects of all types and sizes - the "plumbing" of the AI industry. It is a place for downstream open source builders to meet the unsung heroes who thanklessly maintain the "load-bearing" technologies powering much of the AI ecosystem. We invite project contributors to present their features, architecture, design, real-world use cases, and integrations. We encourage end users to share how open source low-level AI projects are helping them solve their everyday challenges. Ultimately, we hope that this DevRoom will be a chance to identify collaboration opportunities between projects, and to discuss building opinionated AI stacks. We believe in the individual open source programmer. You don't need a megacorporation's budget to make significant breakthroughs in how we put open and weight-available AI models to good use. With judicious use of AI-assisted coding, a single open source hacker can make a real difference to the state of the art. We are looking for maintainers and committers of core low-level AI projects, downstream projects building on top of them, and end users of AI stacks. If you are wondering what type of projects are of interest, here are some examples we´d love to hear about: * Open Source Agentic Coding harnesses: Shelley, Pi, OpenCode * Bare metal and edge AI: ExecuTorch, LiteRT, IREE * Physical AI: LeRobot/Pollen Robotics, Dronecode, openpi * AI compilers and kernel frameworks: PyTorch, MLIR, IREE, Mojo, Triton, BLIS/BLAS, Kompute/Vulkan * Inference frameworks: ggml/llama.cpp, tinygrad, zml * Inference servers: Triton/Dynamo, Docker Model Runner, Paddler, ramalama * Open source agentic coding harnesses and local coding agents: pi, Shelley, Cyclo * Open weights model training and fine-tuning: Bielik, Allen Institute (OLMo), Hugging Face, Unsloth * RISC-V based open source AI accelerator hardware: AIFoundry, Tenstorrent, MosaicSoC, MIPS and Global Foundries. ...and many, many more. In previous years we had a bias towards inference, fine-tuning and quantization over training. This year we are widening our scope: open weights training is very welcome, as long as the focus is on the open source tooling that makes it possible outside of the largest labs. We still love Edge and Physical AI. This Devroom is a safe space for everyone, so we kindly ask all participants to follow the [FOSDEM code of conduct](https://fosdem.org/2027/practical/conduct/) We strongly encourage submissions from individuals of all genders, ethnicities, abilities, and backgrounds to foster a diverse and inclusive environment. We also welcome first-time speakers and, if needed, we will be happy to help you rehearse your talk before the event. Desirable topics ================ We would like to invite all FOSDEM participants to share the joys of hands-on, low-level AI hacking (as opposed to simply consuming AI technology). Topics we have in mind include: **Edge, bare metal and physical AI** * AI on minimal resource targets (bare metal/RTOS on microcontroller and DSP class processors) * AI for image, video, audio and sensor data on small devices (MobileNet, YOLO, Liquid...) * Physical AI: drones, robotics and other AI beyond LLMs **Hardware** * Open source AI acceleration hardware (e.g. [PULP Neureka](https://github.com/pulp-platform/neureka)) * Advances in specialized hardware acceleration (ASICs, RISC-V based accelerators, NPUs etc.) * GPGPU computing and accelerators (Vulkan, Kompute, ...) **Compilers, kernels and runtimes** * IREE and other MLIR based AI compilers * Matmul kernels in various libraries (BLAS, cuBLAS, Auto-TVM) * Open source AI inference engines and servers * Efficiency of AI runtimes: speed, code size and energy usage * Advanced topics in model quantization **Training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and scaling** * Open weights model training and fine-tuning on modest hardware * Distributed computing for AI * Scaling RL and Agentic environments * Data preparation frameworks and how they map to data engineering practices * Large-scale performance analysis and debugging **Beyond neural networks** * Non-neural network AI frameworks (Bayesian inference, genetic programming, etc.) **Tools and community** * Open source agentic coding harnesses and local coding agents, and how they are changing low-level AI development * The "documentation gap": how do we make open source AI platforms accessible to new users? * Governance of upstream-downstream relationships (e.g. llama.cpp and its downstream consumers, balkanization of the llama.cpp/ggml landscape, ...) * The use of free and open source software in the low-level AI engineering community We'd like to make the devroom as diverse as possible, so we are looking to offer a mixture of presentations, short tutorials, demos, and discussions. Presentations must be related to open source software, but we do encourage submissions that push boundaries and experiment with the unexpected. We´d like to hear about new developments in: * Optimizing AI workflows for low cost and small hardware * Optimizing AI pipelines to reduce energy consumption * Tooling and methods that make individuals hacking on AI more efficient, so that they can compete with the "throw your money at all the hardware you can get" approach * Making the most of existing SDKs, hardware and tooling to focus on doing AI without the overhead of setting things up As well as more off-the-beaten-track topics. Here are a few ideas: * Why does being able to "hack" AI matter? * Are we at the mercy of big corporations with a lot of money when it comes to AI? * Progress and possible upcoming contenders in the "hardware wars" for AI Or, of course, a superposition of the above! Proposed talks should focus on substance over AI hype. Please make your talk accessible to people who are not experts in your particular domain: the focus should be on the software and hardware, not on the underlying science. If you have a wild idea that doesn´t fit into these categories, perfect-we love surprises! If it´s weird, bold, or thought-provoking, we want to hear about it. Gory details of talk submission =============================== All submissions must be made via the [FOSDEM Pretalx event planning site](https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp) If you already have a Pretalx account from a previous FOSDEM, please don't create a new one. To reset your password, go to the Pretalx front page and request a password reset. During submission please make sure to select "AI Plumbers" from the Track list. Please provide a meaningful abstract and description of your proposed session. We expect more proposals than we can possibly accept, so it is vitally important that you submit your proposal on or before the deadline. Please note that the submission deadline is managed by the FOSDEM team and not by the devroom managers, which means that after that deadline nothing will be accepted. This is non-negotiable. The communication language of the devroom is English. All content must relate to free and open source software. All presentations will be recorded and made available under Creative Commons licenses. In the Submission notes field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-By-SA-4.0 or CC-By-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: `"If my presentation is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, <NAME>."` Once you´re on the FOSDEM 2027 Pretalx website: * Make sure the title and subtitle of your talk are descriptive, as titles will be listed alongside ~500 from other projects * Select "AI Plumbers" as the track. * Select "Talk" event type * Provide a short abstract of one paragraph * Provide a longer description if you wish to do so * Make sure there is a short bio and contact information * Add links to related websites / blogs etc. * Make sure to indicate your desired talk duration. This year we welcome talks that are either * 10 min (short introduction of project/topic) * 20 min (normal slot - most of our slots will be this) * 40 min (extraordinary slot for a topic that needs a deeper explanation) Note that we may negotiate your talk duration down with you, since we are almost guaranteed to receive more proposals than the day allows. * If you plan to register your proposal in several tracks to increase your chances, DON´T! Register your talk once, in the most accurate track. If our devroom is not your first choice, just let us know, and give us a chance to save you a slot in case of rejection by the primary devroom. We coordinate AI-related submissions with the RISC-V and HPC devrooms, so a good talk submitted to the "wrong" one of the three will still find a home. * For accepted talks: * You will receive an email to tell you that we accept your proposal * Expect additional emails with more instructions * The Pretalx system will be open for applications from November 1st, 2026. Volunteering & Sponsorships =========================== FOSDEM needs you! Every year, the FOSDEM team is assisted by an enthusiastic team of volunteers to help out with various tasks and make the event a fun and safe place for all our visitors. There are some benefits to being a volunteer, but most importantly you help make FOSDEM possible! Whether or not you submit a talk, please consider volunteering if you plan on attending the devroom. Every small contribution counts, even just half an hour, so if you want to help make our devroom a success, please let us know so we can stay in touch and plan. Visit the [volunteer page](https://volunteers.fosdem.org/) to sign up. We are also always looking for volunteers to help around our DevRoom itself. Visit [this site](https://aifoundry.org/#fosdem) to sign up. We are also looking for sponsors to help us cover the following costs: * speaker dinner * speaker gifts * devroom-specific swag (T-shirts, stickers, etc.) * venue and/or catering for a pre-FOSDEM day event Please contact the organizers (see below) if you´d like to sponsor any of these. Organizers ========== You can reach out directly to the organizers if you have a specific request or question. We have a dedicated mailing list at fosdem@aifoundry.org with all of the organizers directly subscribed to it. The organizers currently are: * Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@apache.org> * Tanya Dadasheva <tanya@nekko.ai> * Jeremy Bennett <jeremy.bennett@embecosm.com> * Pietra Ferreira <pietra.ferreira@embecosm.com> * Ben Burtenshaw (Hugging Face) <benjamin.burtenshaw@huggingface.co> * Carol Chen (Red Hat) <carol@redhat.com> * Dominik Kawka (Red Hat) <dkawka@redhat.com> * Rod Burns (Roofline AI) <burns@roofline.ai> * Moritz Scherer <moritz@mosaic-soc.com> You can follow updates on this devroom over at: * Follow us on X: @aifoundryorg * [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/company/aifoundry-org) * Mastodon: aifoundry@fosstodon.org Devroom Dinner and pre-FOSDEM event =================================== Over the years, it has become a tradition that devroom speakers and enthusiasts meet for dinner somewhere in Brussels on the evening of the devroom to continue discussions, socialize and meet old and new friends. We plan to follow that tradition in 2027 and will share the exact arrangements later. Depending on how much interest we get, we may also give our community one more chance to meet face-to-face at a pre-FOSDEM event. Stay tuned for more announcements. If your organization can help with sponsorship for either of these, we would love to hear from you. Spread the word and discuss =========================== If you know of any mailing lists where this CfP would be relevant, please forward this document. If this devroom excites you, please blog or microblog about it, especially if you are submitting a talk. If you regularly blog about AI plumbing topics, please feel free to send details about your blog to fosdem@aifoundry.org. Useful Links ============ * [FOSDEM 2027 website](https://fosdem.org/2027/) * [FOSDEM Code of Conduct](https://fosdem.org/2027/practical/conduct/) * [FOSDEM Fringe (events around FOSDEM)](https://fosdem.org/2027/fringe/)