Ava Nakamura
Staff ML Engineer
Lumen AI
Ava leads the evaluation platform at Lumen AI, where she is responsible for making sure model changes ship without quietly regressing customer-facing quality. She spent six years in search relevance before moving to LLM systems.
Their schedule2 sessions
Monday, October 12, 2026
Building reliable agents: a practitioner's playbook
Agents fail in ways that traditional services do not: partially, plausibly, and expensively. This talk is the playbook we wish we had — bounded tool surfaces, idempotent actions, replayable traces, checkpointing, and the escalation paths that keep a human in the loop without keeping them in the way.
Speakers
- SMSofia Marchetti
Founding Engineer · Vantage Labs
- ANAva Nakamura
Staff ML Engineer · Lumen AI
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Closing panel: what we got wrong about agents
Four practitioners compare notes on the agent architectures they abandoned, the assumptions that did not survive production, and what they would build differently today.
Speakers
- NBNoah Blackwood
Chief Technology Officer · Fathom Robotics
- DODaniel Okonkwo
Director of AI · Meridian Health
- ANAva Nakamura
Staff ML Engineer · Lumen AI