Startup Networking Night: Embedded AI In Practice
Taiwan AI Startups Community & Columbia Venture Community Startups Networking Night
This month, the Taiwan AI Startups Community (TASC) is teaming up with Columbia Venture Community Taiwan (CVC) for a joint Startup Networking Night in Taipei.
TASC is an IRL-first community for founders, engineers, researchers, students, and operators who are actively building and using AI in Taiwan. Our events exist to create a clear meeting point for Taiwan's AI ecosystem — connecting people across disciplines and stages, and focusing on real experience over theory or hype.
Columbia Venture Community Taiwan hosts a monthly gathering bringing together entrepreneurs, alumni, industry veterans, and investors shaping the future of innovation in Taiwan and beyond. Joining forces this month means a bigger room, more cross-pollination between AI builders and the broader startup/investor community, and a great excuse to stay late.
Expert Talks: Embedded AI In Practice
This month we have two talks from experts both abroad and Taiwan. One zoomed in on applied computer vision, one zoomed out to the hardware that makes embedded AI possible. Together they give a picture of what it takes to ship AI from research into real systems.
Tek Lim, Founder & CEO of Next Integral
Next Integral builds edge-based computer vision systems for industrial applications. In this talk, Tek will walk through the fundamentals of modern computer vision — from core concepts and deep learning techniques to real-world system deployment. He'll cover how visual data is processed, key insights from research, the challenges of applying these methods in production environments, and lessons learned from deploying CV systems at scale.
Tek holds a PhD in Physics from École Polytechnique (France) and has 15+ years of experience bridging AI research with real-world applications.
Chan-Liang Wu, CTO & GM of IC Design BU, MICROIP
Chan-Liang will speak on embedded AI — what it takes to run modern AI workloads on embedded hardware, and the design decisions that shape performance, power, and cost at the edge. With a career spanning CAD/EDA, SoC development, 3DIC integration, and IP development for FinFET processes, he brings a silicon-first perspective that complements the software/application view in Tek's talk.
Agenda
18:30 — Doors open
19:00 — Event starts / intros
19:20 — Talk 1: From Computer Vision Theory to Real-World Systems — Tek Lim, Next Integral
19:40 — Talk 2: Embedded AI — Chan-Liang Wu, MICROIP
20:00 — Startup pitches + founder breakout sessions
21:00 — Event ends
Fee: NT$700, paid in cash at the door.
Who should come
Founders building with or on top of AI
Engineers and researchers working on applied ML CV deep learning
Investors looking at early-stage AI in Taiwan and the region
Operators, students, and anyone actively exploring how AI is being used on the ground