TAICO July 2026 Meetup @TrendAI

Registration and Event Details

Please note that we are using Meetup.com for event registration and you must register through that link to attend. Seating is limited so please register early. Thank you and see you there!

Our goal is to bring artificial intelligence and cybersecurity together. To do that, we need to explore what’s happening in AI and what’s happening in cybersecurity, and where the two intersect and collide. We’re also working to understand how we solve problems in these areas, what that looks like, and how Canada can and will participate.

With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce our speakers and the agenda for our next meeting!

Wayfinding: How to Get to the Event

The TAICO team is happy to announce our next meetup at the TrendAI office in Toronto. Much thanks to TrendAI for hosting!

Wayfinding and Getting to the Event:

• There is paid parking conveniently located directly across the street at 85 Hanna Ave. You can use the Impark app to pay for parking. Rates are $2.00 for the first hour and $3.00 for each additional hour.
• Additional parking is available at 99 Atlantic Ave. Payment can be made through the Indigo app, which offers an evening flat rate of $10.00 starting at 6:00 PM.
• If you’re taking transit, there are several streetcar routes nearby, including the 504, 63, and 304. We are also approximately a 10-minute walk from the GO Station, and there are plenty of Bike Share Toronto stations throughout the area.

Agenda

• 👋 Welcome and introductions
• 🙏 Thank you to our amazing hosts and sponsors!
• 🎙️ Speakers
• ⚡ Lightning Talks and Demos
• 🤝 Networking
• 👋 Wrap-up

Sponsors

Thanks to our host, TrendAI!

Speakers

🎤 Speaker #1: Alfredo Oliveira - Threat Research

Abstract:

We cloned ~19,000 MCP server projects from GitHub and pointed vulnerability-analysis agents at their code. The initial sweep looked alarming over 17,000 hits, exactly the kind of number that headlines a model launch. Under scrutiny, only around 4% survived as genuinely exploitable, mostly SQL injection, RCE, and path traversal. Two takeaways from this research: MCP’s rapid sprawl is widening the attack surface, and LLMs used as security tools are confidently wrong far more often than their raw output suggests. Multistage verification trims the noise but doesn’t remove it.

About Alfredo:

Alfredo Oliveira is a cybersecurity researcher with experience in AI and cloud container security. He has authored numerous articles and papers addressing critical cyber security topics. His unique insights and threat modelling capabilities provide valuable awareness of modern attack vectors. From container registries to uncovering modern AI vulnerabilities, Alfredo’s research has significantly contributed to the understanding of modern cybersecurity threats while providing actionable insights included in the MITRE framework & Atlas case studies.

🎤 Speaker #2: Lei Zhou

Abstract:

Most teams solving AI sovereignty stop at the cloud layer —data residency policies, regional cloud providers, open-weight models on private infrastructure. That’s the easy part.

The hard part is what happens below the API gateway. When your sovereign LLM nodes run on MaaS infrastructure, your inference workloads still execute on shared physical hardware — isolated by hypervisors and provider policy, not by cryptographic proof. What does data residency actually guarantee when you can’t attest to the hardware state? How do you verify your sovereign deployment is sovereign — not just hosted somewhere that says it is?

This talk walks through the real-world architecture and deployment of a three-tier sovereign LLM stack across EU, NA, and Asia-Pacific — from stakeholder discovery and CSP evaluation through gateway policy enforcement and regional node deployment. We’ll cover the evaluation framework that goes beyond price and latency to data residency verification and trust boundary analysis, the hardware-aware model benchmarking methodology that changes which models you choose in production, and the specific architectural gaps that only become visible when you look below the application layer — and what closing them actually requires.

You’ll leave with a deployable three-tier sovereign architecture pattern, a CSP evaluation framework you can apply immediately, and a precise understanding of where MaaS-based sovereignty ends and what hardware-level trust would need to add.

About Lei Zhou:

Lei Zhou is Principal Tech Lead at Linaro, where he led the end-to-end design and deployment of a company-wide three-tier sovereign LLM transformation — from stakeholder discovery and organisational consensus-building through architecture design, CSP evaluation, and multi-regional node deployment across EU, NA, and Asia-Pacific. His background spans 25+ years across the complete systems stack — from semiconductor platform security at Qualcomm, AMD, and BlackBerry through mixed-criticality automotive SDV architecture and AI/LLM infrastructure at Linaro — with deep expertise in hardware-rooted trust, TEE isolation, confidential computing, and secure infrastructure deployment. Speaker at Embedded World 2026 (Nuremberg), AGL All Member Meeting 2026 (Tokyo), and EdgeTech+ Japan 2025. Published on platform security and automotive real-time systems at Zenodo and Medium

Lightning Talks and Demos

• Lightning Talks - 5 to 10 minutes long

1. Curtis Collicutt - An Overview of AI Hardware - From Smartphones to Massive Data centers
2. You? - Please reach out if you’d like to do a lightning talk or demo - anyone is welcome to demo something they are working on

Always Looking for Speakers of Any Level!

Please reach out to us if you’d like to present at the meetup. We are looking for people to talk about what they are working on, what they are building and learning, and are open to any level of experience and technical depth. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, we want to hear from you! We’re all just out here building and learning.

• 👋 See You There!

Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you at the meetup!