IEEE Central Indiana Launches Tech Talk Series on Governed AI Agents
The IEEE Computer Society’s Central Indiana Chapter has launched the Tech Talk Series, a live webinar program that connects IEEE members, undergraduate and graduate students, and engineering professionals from IEEE Region 4 with industry practitioners, according to IEEE Spectrum.
The monthly sessions have so far covered AI governance and security, agentic systems (AI agents that take actions on a user’s behalf rather than only generating text), and related topics. Speakers have come from Apple, Tavant, and Zscaler.
Two of the sessions illustrate the range. Gajendra Babu Thokala, a senior engineering leader at Apple in Seattle, presented “Feeding and Fencing AI Agents: Engineering Governed Agentic Systems on Real-Time Data.” Sandeep Shivam, a product and technology leader at Tavant in Dallas, led “Building AI Native Products: A Playbook for Agentic Systems.” One session addresses the control plane, the layer that decides what agents consuming streaming data can see and do. The other covers the product architecture needed to ship agentic features in the first place.
The IEEE Central Indiana Section also promoted a practical engineering session on securing autonomous AI agents that involved Zscaler. A separate technical talk on building governed AI-agent systems with real-time data, covered by Techpoint in July, is free to attend.
Upcoming sessions and registration details are listed on the IEEE Region 4 virtual events calendar. The calendar lists “AI-Driven Global Commerce Readiness: An Execution Harness for Distributed Systems” for November 20, 4:00 to 5:00 pm CST. Amit Kumar Padhy is the listed speaker, and the Central Indiana IEEE Computer Society co-sponsors the session. Registration is handled through https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/590928. The same calendar lists “Building Trusted AI - Data Consistency, Governance & Information Quality” on November 5, 6:00 to 7:00 pm CST, presented by ACM-IEEE WIE Twin Cities.
The program’s subject matter follows where enterprise and consumer engineering teams are spending their attention. Agentic systems raise problems that sit between model engineering and platform operations: how agents are granted access to live data, how their actions are constrained and audited, and how those controls are validated before a product ships. A volunteer-run chapter drawing speakers from a consumer device maker, a product consultancy, and a zero-trust security vendor (one that verifies every access request rather than trusting by default) offers a view of those problems from more than one seat at the table.
In my view, the most useful part of the format is the mix of audiences. Students and early-career engineers hear directly from people building and securing these systems at scale, and practitioners get the same access without travelling to a conference. Whether the series sustains that mix over successive months will determine how much practical engineering it passes on.
