Speaker: Jacopo Tagliabue & Ciro Greco
Location: Soda Hall, 510
Date: Friday, Feb 6th, 2026
Time: 12 – 1 pm PT
Title: We solved trust for AI Agents in 1973 (we just forgot)
Abstract:
Most enterprises do not trust agents to operate on production data lakes: as a result, data engineering is lagging behind the general programming population in leveraging coding assistants and AI tools. We argue that the popular strategy of trading generality for perceived trust is misguided: the agentic lakehouse should happen without having to assume trust and global coordination at all. We operationalize our agenda by re-interpreting in the OLAP world three insights from the MVCC literature: process isolation, data versioning, declarative APIs. Taken together, they allow a swarm of agents to perform safe and concurrent work on production data. Going from theory to practice, we describe the core implementation choices behind Bauplan – from git-for-data to transactional pipelines and SDK design -, and share lessons learned and open problems from running data workloads at scale.
Speaker Bio:
Jacopo Tagliabue is the co-founder of Bauplan, a data and AI infrastructure company. Previously, he co-founded Tooso (acquired by TSX:CVO), led Coveo’s AI through its IPO, and built Coveo Labs, whose libraries, models, and datasets have garnered thousands of stars and millions of downloads. His research spans AI, NLP, information retrieval, data management, and computer systems, with collaborations at Netflix, NVIDIA, Stanford, and Wisconsin-Madison. While building Bauplan, he moonlights as a professor of ML Systems at NYU (which is only notable because it’s the only job he’s ever had that his parents understand).
Ciro Greco – co-founder and CEO at Bauplan, a serverless computing platform for complex data workloads. Developers can write complex, multi-language data pipelines with zero environment management and infrastructure configuration and the same instantaneous feedback loop as running code locally. Ciro is also adjunct professor at the IEOR Department at Columbia University where he teaches AI applications. Formerly, he was the founder of Tooso, an NLP startup based in San Francisco. Tooso was acquired by Coveo in 2019 and Ciro was in the management team that brought Coveo to IPO in 2021. In a previous life he got a PhD in Neuroscience at Milan-Bicocca, a postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University and he was visiting scientist at MIT.