2025 Pittsburgh TechFest

Call for Proposals

Pittsburgh TechFest is a one-day event designed for technologists, developers, and engineers from Southwestern Pennsylvania to convene, explore and elevate. The event will feature keynotes, technical talks, and panel discussions covering a broad range of topics in AI, software development, security, and career growth. The conference aims to provide a platform for learning, networking, and collaboration among professionals.

What you can expect in programming:

• Present Problem – Solution – Impact
• Storytelling with Data
• Live Demo and Discussion
• Engage with Big Ideas
• Interactive Demo, Challenge, or Tech Workshop
• Unconference – take away the structure and engage in an informal exchange of information and ideas between technologists

When: Friday, October 24, 2025
Where: Carnegie Mellon University | Tepper School of Business

Agenda: 8:30am-4:00pm

Submit Your Proposal HERE.

Topics are listed below and all development stacks are welcome!

• UX as an Agile Role
• Using AI tools in Business and Development
• Keeping it Human (AI Related Ethics)
• Career Progression and Managing Up
• Home Labs and DIY Tech
• Data Science
• Mapping and Robotics
• Developer Tools for Immediate Use
• Front End Development (HTMX, Angular, React, Svelte, Vue, etc.)
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Engineering
• Personal Privacy and Security
• Social Web (Fediverse)

Keynote:

Mike Rainey | Research Scientist, CMU

Mike is a research scientist in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. Before CMU, he spent time at Indiana University, INRIA-Paris’s DeepSea/Gallium groups, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, after finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Mike’s research sits at the boundary of programming-language design and high-performance computing. He co-created Heartbeat Scheduling and Oracle-Guided Scheduling, ways to keep parallel tasks balanced without wasting CPU cycles, and the Task Parallel Assembly Language, which carries those ideas down to the OS/assembly-language level. Lately he’s been collaborating on LoCal/Gibbon, a type-safe framework for working directly with serialized data, while also publishing on efficient graph algorithms, data structures, and language-support for multicore parallelism. His work shows up in venues like PLDI, POPL, PPoPP, ASPLOS, ICFP, and SC, and his open-source prototypes power experiments with tomorrow’s multicore software.

Schedule:

Thank you to our host sponsor:

Thank you to our sponsors:

Contact Information:
For content or logistics questions: Megan Colf, Director, Event Management, mcolf@pghtech.org
For registration questions: Lauren Lowen, Event Coordinator, llowen@pghtech.org
For sponsorship questions: Ashley Steckel, Vice President of Business Development, asteckel@pghtech.org