Cognitive Memory Architectures: Designing Continuity into Long-Running RAG and Agentic Soluitions

ODSC AI West 2026

Oct 27, 2026 · Time to be announced

Modern AI systems are impressive until you ask them to behave like anything other than a goldfish by asking them to remember what happened five minutes, five days, or five sessions ago. That works for one-off question answering, but it breaks down when agents need to support long-running tasks, adapt to user preferences, recover from past mistakes, or reason across evolving contexts. This session explores Cognitive Memory Architectures as a practical design pattern for moving beyond "stuff everything into the context window and pray," humanity's most computationally expensive filing cabinet. Grounded by Endel Tulving's distinction between episodic and semantic memory, we will focus on how concepts, like episodic memory, can give RAG and agentic systems durable continuity across interactions. Rather than flattening every conversation into summaries or vector traces, episodic memory preserves the event-level details that matter: what happened, when it happened, why it mattered, and how it should influence future behavior. We will examine how agents can store raw interaction records, consolidate useful memories over time, separate temporary context from durable knowledge, and apply controlled forgetting so memory improves reasoning instead of becoming an ever-growing junk drawer of embeddings. The workshop will start with a simple RAG Agent and progressively build towards a stateful multi-agent system with durable memory using Python.

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Hybrid · Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, Burlingame, California, United States

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