[Mafer AI x BSC AI Factory] Teaching AI a Sense of Smell

Every fragrance, flavour and cosmetic you’ve ever used started in a lab. That lab still runs on decades-old tools. Its most valuable knowledge lives in lab files nobody can search and in the heads of a few experts. Frontier models can’t fix that alone: they’re brilliant with text and code, but blind to lab data. At Mafer, we build the models that can read it, so chemists don’t have to dig through twenty years of files. Our rule: build or sell, never both. So we don’t make much noise. But on December 10, together with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, we want to show how we do research beyond the state of the art and turn it into product, for an industry that isn’t the sexiest but moves the world. Why the BSC? Mafer is part of the BSC AI Factory, which gives us access to MareNostrum 5 and more than 50,000 H100 GPU hours. That compute is what lets a startup train and test its own models at a scale usually reserved for big labs. The talk: Teaching AI a sense of smell The problem: why lab data is so hard to make AI-ready The research: what we’re testing on top of the state of the art The compute: how we use the BSC AI Factory and MareNostrum 5 to train our own models The harness: frontier models plus our own models, agents and data, in production The product: MaferOS, and where AI in R&D is heading No chemistry background needed. If you’re a researcher, an engineer or an operator who wants to work on AI problems nobody has solved yet, this one’s for you. Agenda 6:30 PM · Doors open 7:00 PM · Mafer × BSC: who we are and how we work together (15 min) 7:15 PM · Talk (30 min) 7:45 PM · Q&A 8:00 PM · Beers & networking on the rooftop Spots are limited.