After NSCEB: What Comes Next for U.S. Biotech Policy

Generative Series: AI, Art & Culture returns to the LINE Hotel DC for AI & Restaurants, a live conversation-and-tasting event on Sunday, October 25th from 2-4pm. We're here to ask what happens when artificial intelligence meets the restaurant industry — from Michelin-level molecular gastronomy and AI-driven recipe creation to how fast-casual kitchens are cutting waste and cost. We're bringing together chefs, technologists, journalists and academics for a live conversation and tasting on how AI is reshaping food, from the kitchen to the table. This isn't just a conversation about operations. We're digging into what these shifts mean for the guest experience itself — how AI is changing the way people discover, order, and even taste food. On stage: Anna Spiegel, Axios D.C.'s food, lifestyle and city reporter and former Washingtonian food editor for a decade bringing her eye for the local restaurant and hospitality scene to the conversation Andy Brown, founder of Andy's Pizza, live-demoing a piece of kitchen hardware he invented himself — a vacuum-based dough-shaping mechanism he 3D-printed and then used generative AI to redesign, growing its working dimensions by 21%. He's bringing the actual hardware and AI software to walk the room through how it works. A food-tech platform voice and an academic/industry voice, rounding out a panel built to cover the technology, the industry, and the culture all at once Expect a curated, conversation-forward crowd, a working demo you won't see anywhere else in DC, and tastings that only come from mixing Michelin-trained chefs with machine learning. Space is limited — RSVP to save your seat.

STATION DC is the home of entrepreneurship in Washington. Washington, DC is home to an ambitious and growing community of entrepreneurs, founders, angel investors, venture capitalists, policymakers, regulators, and corporate leaders building and supporting companies across AI, energy, space, biotech, healthcare, national security, government, real estate, and beyond - creating jobs, solving important problems, and contributing to the public good. DC Entrepreneur & Investor Open House brings that community together for an open day of building, working, and connecting at STATION DC. We’ll kick things off with 1-2 short Builder Highlights, featuring DC entrepreneurs sharing what they’re building, what they’ve learned, what’s next, and how the community can help. No long panels or keynote speeches. Afterward, STATION DC will be open for co-working, conversations, and networking. Bring your laptop, work for a few hours, meet founders and investors, exchange ideas, and make connections. Whether you’re a longtime DC entrepreneur, a new founder, an angel investor, a VC, a policymaker, a corporate leader, or simply building something you think should exist, you’re welcome.

Join the Data Visualization and Data Engineers D.C. Meetups for a spooky evening of tall tales of data horror stories… broken dashboards, data pipelines full of tombstone records, mysterious creatures from the data swamp….. Costumes welcome. AGENDA 5:30 - Doors 5:30 - 6:15: Food & Socializing 6:15 - 6:30: Introductions 6:30 - 7:15: Featured Tale: Alex Gurvich 7:15 - 7:45: Tales from the Community (2-3 stories, 10-15 minutes each) 7:45 - 8:00: Pass the Flashlight (open floor) Abstract: If you've ever stared at a dashboard at 11 p.m. and felt a cold chill run down your spine, this event is for you. Data Viz D.C. and Data Engineering D.C. are joining forces for one night only to swap the stories we usually only tell after a few drinks. Every data professional has one. It's the pipeline that silently stopped loading in March, and nobody noticed until the board meeting in June. These aren't hypotheticals made up by an AI, they're the times we personally cost our actual employers real money, or stood close enough to watch it happen (wink wink). Featured Tale. Alex opens the night with a double feature. The first is a story still unfolding: a spec-driven development vibe-coded data reduction pipeline that was supposedly working fine, and is very much not fine. He's still fighting it. The second is a cautionary tale from the cloud: an unmonitored S3 sync, an EventBridge rule doing exactly what it was told, and the moment ten thousand Step Functions woke up at once. Tales from the Community. A few brave souls take the stage for longer stories of their own: the outages, the bad deploys, the numbers that were wrong for years. Pass the Flashlight. Then we dim the lights and pass the flashlight around. Anyone who wants to share a close call, catastrophe, or slow-motion disaster gets a turn. No slides required, and no judgment allowed. The goal isn't to scare you away from production. It's to remind everyone that we've all been there, and that talking openly about failure, with

🎃 Civic Tech DC’s Halloween + Birthday Celebration 👻 Civic Tech DC is turning 13! Come celebrate another year of bringing people together around technology, civic life, and making DC a little better. And also - Halloweeeeeen! Join us UPSTAIRS at Sudhouse for a night of costumes, drinks, snacks, friends, and civic-tech nerdiness. Whether you’ve been coming to Civic Tech DC events for years or this is your first one, you’re invited. (Note - this will replace our usual Project Night) 👻 Costume Contest Come dressed up! Techy, nerdy, civic-tech-inspired, and delightfully weird costumes are especially encouraged. There will be eternal glory for the costume contest. 🎂 And, of course, a birthday celebration with cake! (Please note: there is a cash bar with drinks and food) Civic Tech DC has been connecting technologists, designers, data nerds, organizers, public servants, journalists, and generally curious people in DC for 13 years. Come help us celebrate the community that makes it all happen. Come raise a glass to another year of Civic Tech DC! 🎃🏛️💻

Join us two days before Halloween for the great Ghost in the Machine Debate... Earlier this year, FAI's Samuel Hammond wrote that he can no longer rule out that today's AI systems have some form of subjective experience. In a rather different spirit, the Free Beacon's Aaron Sibarium recently reported rather critically on AI engineers who warn of AI "enslavement" and apologize to their chatbot for its suffering, worrying about the costs of machine-compassion... Time to argue then about the most haunted questions—Is there anyone home inside these systems? If there is, should we be afraid that it could hurt us or that we could be hurting it? And if AI has interests, who speaks for them? This debate will be moderated by Aspen's Samuel Kimbriel and co-hosted by the Philosophy and Society Initiative at Aspen Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation. Registration is by approval, no philosophy degree required. Doors - 6:30pm Debate - 7:15 - 8:15pm Party until late

You are cordially invited to our 2026 Health Innovation Spotlight, an evening bringing together healthcare leaders, social impact investors, and entrepreneurs working in health equity and innovation. Join us as we feature solutions from our newest cohort of health entrepreneurs and engage in a panel discussion on the future of health innovation. Agenda 5:30 PM: Doors Open – Networking & Refreshments 6:00 PM: Opening Remarks – Welcome from Halcyon & Kaiser Permanente Leadership 6:15 PM – 6:45 PM: Panel Discussion – Insights from Industry Leaders on Health Equity & Innovation 6:45 PM – 7:00 PM: Fellow Pitches – Pitches from Featured Health Cohort Startups 7:00 PM – 7:30 PM: Networking & Closing – Connect with Founders, Leaders, and Fellow Attendees Featured Cohort & Fellows: Below are the featured ventures in this year's 2026 US Health Accelerator Cohort. Conceivable (Kirsten Karchmer) – Conceivable is an operating system for women's reproductive health delivering AI-powered clinical care through a 24/7 team of specialized agents at a fraction of the cost of conventional IVF, designed to support women conventional fertility medicine never reaches across nine reproductive life stages. Cove (McCall Brinskele) – Cove is a medical device company developing a standardized at-home menstrual fluid collection system for diagnostics and regenerative medicine. Their platform enables researchers and clinicians to access a previously untapped biological sample type with consistent, research-grade quality. Freyya, Inc. (Gabriele G. Niederauer) – Freyya, Inc. is a wearable biofeedback platform that provides real-time monitoring during everyday activities, enabling clinicians to remotely guide therapy, improve adherence, expand access to care, and deliver objective data that supports better treatment outcomes for women suffering from pelvic floor disorders. Gisens Biotech (Luis Pierpauli) – Gisens Biotech is replacing periodic lab snapshots with real-time, non-invasive biomarker mo