In our mission to bring together AI enthusiasts, researchers, and professionals from across the Utrecht region to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and grow together in the field of AI. Our AI nights are the regular meetups we organize, held ten times a year.

Program:
17:30 Walk-in & dinner
18:30 Dennis Vroegop - Do You Want to Play a Game? Learning Reinforcement Learning the Fun Way
19:45 Douwe van de Ruit - Workshop how to build your first intelligent agent using Azure AI Foundry and the Azure AI Agent Service
20:30 Drinks and Networking 21:00 Wrap-up

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Session descriptions:

This evening, Dennis Vroegop will take us on a journey of reinforcement learning:
Do You Want to Play a Game? Learning Reinforcement Learning the Fun Way
In the 1983 cult classic WarGames, a young hacker accidentally challenges a military supercomputer to play global thermonuclear war. What started as a simple game turned into a lesson: machines can learn… and sometimes faster than we expect. In this session, we’ll explore Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is the branch of AI where systems don’t just follow instructions but learn by doing. Together, we’ll explore how agents improve through trial and error, why the concept of reward is at the heart of learning, and how RL powers everything from self-driving cars to automated trading systems. Of course, we won’t be doing theory only. We will dive into code and teach a computer to play Tic-Tac-Toe: not by brute force, but by genuine experience. Step by step, you’ll watch it go from clueless to competent, discovering strategies on its own. By the end of the session, you’ll walk away with a clear understanding of what RL is, how it works, and why it’s one of the most exciting frontiers in modern AI. And I promised we will not blow up the world by inadvertently starting World War 3! So… do you want to play a game?

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In addition, Douwe van de Ruit will learn us through a hands-on workshop how to build your first intelligent agent using Azure AI Foundry and the Azure AI Agent Service. We’ll guide you through designing, prompting, and deploying an AI agent that can reason, act, and connect to real data sources.

You’ll explore how agentic apps differ from traditional chatbots, integrate external APIs, and extend toward multi-agent collaboration. By the end, you’ll have a working prototype and a clear path to scale it within real business scenarios.