VIATEC AI Meetup: Technology Track - February

Schedule

Thu Feb 26 2026 at 11:30 am to 01:30 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

Fort Tectoria - Shaw Conference Room | Victoria, BC

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Join us as thought leaders & innovators gather to explore the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and its practical applications.
About this Event

Doors open at 11:30 and presentations start promptly at Noon.

Are you curious about how AI can transform your business and career? Join us at the VIATEC AI Meetup, where local thought leaders and innovators come together to explore the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and its practical applications.

Join us for this fun and engaging session where Will Warren, Community Manager for the Thousand Brains Project will present on:

Reverse Engineering Intelligence

The next major leap in artificial intelligence is unlikely to come from scaling today’s large language models or deep learning architectures. Instead, it will come from understanding and applying the fundamental principles of biological intelligence encoded in the human neocortex (and supporting brain structures)

This talk explores what intelligence looks like when viewed through the lens of neuroscience. Starting at the level of a real pyramidal neuron, it moves upward through the structure of the neocortex: hundreds of thousands of cortical columns, each functioning as a self-contained mini-brain, collectively forming a robust, flexible unit of intelligence that forms the basis of general intelligence. You’ll see how perception emerges from sensorimotor prediction, voting, and hierarchy.

From there, the talk connects these biological principles to a new class of machine intelligence being developed today. It will cover what this approach enables that current AI systems fundamentally cannot, what near-term capabilities are realistic, and how engineers and researchers can begin working with these ideas now.


Coffee and Tea will be served.
Feel free to grab a lunch at the Fort Cafe, located on site.



About the Presenter:

Will Warren is the Community Manager for the Thousand Brains Project, an initiative founded by Jeff Hawkins at Numenta to reverse engineer the neocortex and use those principles to build a new form of machine intelligence. The project is based on nearly two decades of neuroscience research into how intelligence actually works in the brain and how those mechanisms can be translated into scalable computational systems.

Will brings technical leadership, systems thinking, and real-world execution to this work. Prior to Thousand Brains, he was a founder and CTO multiple times over, building and scaling complex software systems from early prototype to large-scale production. His career spans search, e-commerce, distributed systems, developer tooling, and organizational design.


About the Organizers:

This event is organized by Steve Harris, founder of AI4Enterprise and Rob Cooper, Founder of PlusROI Online Marketing, along with the generous support of VIATEC.

This is your chance to connect, learn, and lead in the world of AI innovation.

Spots are limited—RSVP today and be part of Victoria’s AI-powered future!




Agenda

🕑: 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Coffee & Networking
🕑: 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Presentations
🕑: 01:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Networking & Discussion
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Where is it happening?

Fort Tectoria - Shaw Conference Room, 777 Fort Street, Victoria, Canada

Event Location & Nearby Stays:

Tickets

CAD 0.00

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