Keynote: Build Yourself Flowers

Friday, April 17, 2026 · 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM · Auditorium 5

What do we as ML practitioners have in common with Dutch Golden‑Age flower painter Rachel Ruysch?

This talk is about what all aspects of mastery over millennia have in common, and how we, even in an era of mechanical mass code reproduction, can balance new tools with sound engineering practices to create platforms, projects, tools, and outcomes that satisfy sound engineering practices, speed, and our need for ownership.

About the Speaker

Vicki Boykis

Founding ML Engineer, Malachyte

Vicki is a founding ML engineer at Malachyte. Previously, she built LLM-evaluation tooling at Mozilla.ai and search/recommendation systems at Duo and Tumblr. She writes about scalable ML in production, information retrieval, and human-centric AI. She previously organized NormConf, a conference about everyday machine learning. She keynoted PyData Amsterdam and PyCon Italia. In her "free time", she writes short stories, learns to DJ by making terrible mixes and loves Nutella.