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# Hacking AI at the Edge of the Indian Ocean


- **Date:** Thursday, Jul 9, 2026
- **Time:** 17:30–18:00 (30 min)
- **Room:** Stage 8 - powered by Red Hat
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 Europe

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100177-hacking-ai-at-the-edge-of-the-indian-ocean)

## Description

What happens when you have terabytes of 8K video, a team of marine biologists, and zero bars of internet? You build a "far-edge" data center in the middle of a research vessel.
In this session, we recount the high-stakes engineering of a deep-sea hackathon aboard the OceanXplorer. We’ll strip away the gloss and dive into the architecture required to run VLLMs (Large Language Models) and Streamlit app locally in a metal hull surrounded by salt water.
We will explore:
The Offline Stack: Running local inference on massive video files when the nearest cloud region is 3,000 miles and a satellite link away.
The Transition to Scale: How we moved from local "survival mode" to the cloud, utilizing Claude and Cortex AI to enable automation of biodiversity tagging that previously took human scientists weeks.
The "Contextual" Search: Using AI agents to bridge the gap between raw sensor data (salinity, depth) and unstructured media, creating a conversational interface for the ocean floor.

See It In Action: A live demo of asking questions in natural language and getting answers from expedition data.


## Speakers

### [Anastasiia Stefanska](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@anastasiia-stefanska)

Solutions Architect at TUI
### [James Cha-Earley](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@james-cha-earley)

Senior Developer Advocate at Snowflake


## Related talks at this congress

- [Theia AI Live Demo: Air Gapped AI for Developer Tools and IDEs](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1275-theia-ai-live-demo) — Thomas Froment
- [Hack Me, Bro: An Antifragile AI Battle Arena](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1352-hack-me-bro-an) — Andrew Demczuk
- [The Retrieval Layer for Edge AI](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1022-the-retrieval-layer) — Sasha Denisov, Chadha Sridi
- [From Perception to Autonomy: Building Agentic Edge AI Robots with ROS 2](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-europe/sessions/1324-from-perception-to) — Moe Sani