AI Agents in Action: Industry × Academia Exchange
Join us for an evening of food, drinks, and boundary-pushing conversation on the future of AI Agents — co-hosted by Berkeley Summit House and Zhou Yu, Associate Professor of Columbia University, founder of Arklex.ai.
This event brings together top researchers and entrepreneurs from leading institutions and startups to discuss how AI agents are being designed, evaluated, and deployed in the real world.
🧠 Technical advances
🏢 Enterprise adoption and friction points
🚀 Where the next wave of agent innovation may emerge
Agenda
5:00–6:00 PM – Arrival & Social Hour (light bites + drinks)
6:10–7:10 PM – Panel: The AI Agent Ecosystem
7:15–8:00 PM – Open Discussion
💡 Uber/Lyft rides will be reimbursed.
🥂 Refreshments and drinks provided.
Featured Panelists
Alane Suhr
Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley EECS & BAIR. Her work pioneers interactive language agents—she led the creation of CerealBar, a collaborative language-and-robot game, and builds situated language models that learn through interaction.
Rebecca Qian
Co-founder & CTO at Patronus AI, whose platform powers robust, enterprise-grade AI evaluation. She led the company through a $17M Series A to tackle AI trust issues in financial and regulated industries.
Robert Parker
Co-founder & CTO at Perceptix, applying voice + vision AI to transform real-estate inspections. Former Director of Engineering at Amazon (oversaw Alexa, Fire TV Stick, Prime Music), CTO at Samsung SmartThings, and General Manager of Microsoft Asia Pacific. He was also a founding engineer on Microsoft PowerPoint.
Shunyu Yao
Researcher at OpenAI focused on language agents and digital automation. His work explores how LLMs can reason, act, and use tools—pioneering systems like ReAct, Reflexion, SWE-agent, and Tree of Thoughts. He is the author of Language Agents: From Next-Token Prediction to Digital Automation.
Vinay Rao
Advisor at Anthropic, where he focuses on aligning AI systems with human safety and trust. He brings decades of experience designing safeguards and risk frameworks at scale, having led trust & safety efforts across Google, Stripe, and Airbnb.
Zhou Yu
Associate Professor at Columbia and founder of Arklex AI. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she’s recognized for multimodal dialogue systems and persuasive dialog tech—her research won Amazon’s Socialbot competition and ACL best‑paper nominations.
Zoom information
As noted, due to venue capacity limits, you’ve been invited to join us online via Zoom. Below are the full details for remote participation:
Time: Panel starts at 6:10 PM Pacific Time
Zoom Link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/95648761172?pwd=XpVVhZNTZSldnh69fH6jNrP1rsRA5o.1
Meeting ID: 956 4876 1172
Passcode: 473740
We will also share a recap of the event afterwards. Thank you for being part of the community — we’re excited to have you with us online!
RSVP
Space is limited – sign up now to secure your spot for an engaging and intimate evening with leaders in the AI agent space.
We especially welcome those working at the intersection of research and application, including PhD students, founders, engineers, and investors.
Venue
Berkeley Summit House
A hill-top villa perched in the Berkeley Hills, offering a 270° Bay-Area panorama, an atmosphere built for inspiration and connection.
Venue policy: Summit House is a smoke-free, drug-free, alcohol-free space. Please respect this rule so everyone can stay focused and safe.
IMPORTANT: Please check this link to see the specific way to find the venue: https://yhpzzfbe.manus.space/