THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT
[Connection details will be shared 1h before the start time]
The London Clojurians are happy to present:
Title: Programming as and for Inference
Speaker: Christian Weilbach
Time: 2026-05-19 @ 18:30 (London time)
Local time: click here for local time
RSVP: Programming as and for Inference (by Christian Weilbach), Tue, May 19, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup
Christian Weilbach (https://christian.weilbach.name/) will be presenting:
“Programming as and for Inference”
Computation is the organization and application of knowledge. When we program, we draw on memory of code and data, structure our operations syntactically as code to be evaluated, for example in a REPL, and test them as hypotheses against an unknown environment — programming itself is a form of inference. Christian will argue that Clojure, as a functional Lisp with a live REPL, persistent values, and macros, is uniquely positioned to be a (meta)programming medium for artificial intelligence and explicit inference, demonstrating this through three building blocks for modelling living organisational systems: a git-like memory model (Datahike, Yggdrasil), flexible construction and interpretation of models and languages (Raster, Ansatz), and a unified framework integrating these abstractions (Spindel, Simmis). The talk includes live demos — including a Clojure columnar index that beats or matches DuckDB in benchmarks, and a typed-dispatch compiler producing numerics competitive with Julia and JAX. All projects open-sourced at replikativ · GitHub .
Christian is the original author of Datahike and a core maintainer of the replikativ ecosystem for immutable, versioned data systems in Clojure — active in the community since 2013 and a former co-organiser of the Mannheim-Heidelberg Clojure meetup. He recently completed a PhD at the University of British Columbia on Structured Amortized Variational Inference under Frank Wood, with an ICML 2023 oral on Graphically Structured Diffusion Models; earlier contributions to probabilistic programming include work on Anglican and Daphne. His current projects — Raster (a typed-dispatch numerical compiler), Stratum (a columnar index matching DuckDB on single-thread performance), and Simm.is (a platform for collaborative modelling) — integrate these threads into a unified substrate for intelligence and inference. He consults on distributed Datalog, probabilistic modeling, machine learning and high-performance numerical systems, previously he worked on pol.is, and the Swedish Public Employment Service.
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RSVP: Programming as and for Inference (by Christian Weilbach), Tue, May 19, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup