Join the Augmentation Summer Residency on Wearable AI & Personal Agents!
Apply here: https://tinyurl.com/auglabresidency2024
Applications closing on 26 April!
Are you passionate about building personal AI agents and wearable companions? The Augmentation Lab is organizing a second summer residency to shape the wearable and personal AI revolution.
We are calling out to builders passionate about human-machine symbiosis, miniaturized electronics, local and open-source LLMs, multi-agent simulations, edge computing, and secure/decentralized data ownership mechanisms.
We will provide a platform for experimentation, exploration, and development. As a resident, you will have the space, resources, and support to prototype and develop real products. The residency will serve as a hub for learning about technologies that universities don’t offer classes on yet, a community of value-driven potential co-founders, and a place to rethink and rediscover the relationship between upcoming technologies and society.
Join our Discord for more: https://discord.gg/46KxVDtr57
📍 The 2024 Augmentation Residency is an 8-week intensive and independently-run technology incubator designed to shape the next big wearable and personalized AI revolution. The residency will bring 16 transdisciplinary technologists together to advance AI in augmenting human potential.
📅 When: mid-June to mid-August 2024
🇺🇸 Where: Cambridge, MA, @ Harvard Innovation Labs
🧑💻 Who: 16 transdisciplinary builders (professionals, students, researchers, etc. committed to reshaping our approach to technological development)
🏠 How: Housing and food will be covered
Why - Theme
We are moving towards a future of human-machine symbiosis, in which we co-work, co-reason, and co-live with machine intelligence. Personal AI holds the potential to greatly augment our relationships, personalities, productivity, and more. To create context-aware personal AI, we need new physical interfaces that integrate seamlessly into our lives. We need to discover the unsolved problems personal AI can initially solve at the current technological frontier. The personal AI revolution will expose us to unique ethical dilemmas and societal challenges, which we need to consider when building the systems of the future.
The 2024 Augmentation Residency on Wearable AI & Personal Agents will focus on making AI context-aware, applicable to real problems, and ethically developed.
What - Program
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Expected outputs
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Hardware products - with a particular push for open-source hardware; e.g., Raspberry Pi for wearable AI
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AI-based consumer software; e.g., deeply personal AI agents based on journal notes and text messages
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AI infrastructure software; e.g., modular building blocks for building local LLMs on embedded devices
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Data storage/ownership architectures; e.g., Interplanetary File System for personal data
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Integrated hardware-software AI wearables for specific applications; e.g., consumer AI wearables for people with learning disabilities
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Whitepapers; e.g., on creating collective intelligences from personal agents
We anticipate and support startups, crowdsourced products, papers, patents, designs, essays, and digital media to emerge from our residency. We aim to provide each outcome domain with our expertise and resources during and after the residency.
How - Methodology
Augmentation as a lens for living
Central to our philosophy at the Augmentation Lab is hyperpersonal self-experimentation. We want each of our 16 residents to have their own personal agent(s) and wearable(s), which they use and improve over the course of the residency.
The technologies we build need to come from a personal need - either that of our own or a person we deeply care about. (Paul Graham describes a similar approach in his essay "How to Get Startup Ideas.")
We also focus on rapid validation and prototyping. Keeping things simple is hard. As developers who want to build the future, we often fall into the trap of failing to build for the present.
Technical autodidactism
We believe in learning by building and peer-to-peer learning. As we aim to gather the top talents passionate about an augmented future with personal and wearable AI, we expect residents to deliver workshops on what they are skilled in.
We expect the residency will include the following topics:
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Fine-Tuning Local & Open-Source LLMs
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“Memory” Architectures (Embedding Databases, RAG, Knowledge Graphs, Alternatives)
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Multi-Agent Systems
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Embedded Programming and Edge Computing
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Electronics and PCB Design
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Product Design and Fabrication
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Fullstack AI Architectures for Web and Mobile Apps
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Prompting and Prompt-Chaining
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History of Wearable Computing
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Societal implications and policy considerations for personal/wearable AI
Learning for a transdisciplinary future
In addition to learning about the cutting edge of wearable and personal AI tools by building with them, we want our residents to leave the residency with a deep understanding of:
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Rapid prototyping - reducing your idea to a v0
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Finding a "good" idea - hyperpersonal iteration
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Product management - organizing a product process
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Transdisciplinary thinking - living autodidactism
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Future startup models - the rise of indie startups
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Selling products - getting it out
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Leveraging power dynamics
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Crafting a purpose-driven life - how to work on what you love
Who - Organizers
All team members are core members of the Augmentation Lab. They are transdisciplinary developers who have been building generative AI applications, wearables, and human-centric AI systems for the past 2 years. Their experiences span machine learning and generative AI (LLMs, image, video), full-stack app development, electronics and PCB design, physical fabrication, AR/VR development, robotics, bioengineering, human-computer interaction, tech policy, startup scaling, and product management.
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x-disciplinary developer, neuroscientist, writer
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Graduate researcher @ MIT Media Lab
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Final year Master’s student in Bioinformatics
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BSc in Biomedical Sciences from UCL (UK)
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Co-wrote a book on scaling up startups
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Working on integrating biosignals into LLMs & AI wearables
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Transdisciplinary Engineer and Creative Rebel
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Final year Master’s student @ Harvard Graduate School of Design
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Autodidact CS, mechanical engineering, public policy, futurist
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Bachelor’s in Performance from the Julliard School
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Hardware & software hacker, physicist, philosopher
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Physics & CS Junior @ Harvard College
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Former VP @ Harvard Conflux Art-Tech
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Internship experiences at CERN and Harvard Nanoscale Optics Lab
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Working on Multiagent simulations & modeling perception mathematically
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Creative Neurotechnologist, Wearables Strategy Consultant
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Brain-Computer Interface Researcher @ MIT Media Lab
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Psychology & CS @ University of Toronto
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Working on biosensing wearables that improve cognitive health with thoughtful go-to-market strategies for consumer impact
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Native hacker, building XR, robotics, personal Al
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Designing a special major in Human Augmentation @ Harvard College
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Dropped out to be the
CTO @ Vision Cycle, raised to-date $2.5M -
Co-founded the Harvard
AR/VR Developers Club -
Founded a phone repair company at 16, with over 2400 customers & 900 repairs
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Extraterrestrial bioengineering innovator
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Biomedical Engineering BSc @ UoF
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Research in biocompatible microgels and bioprinting lung-based organoids for understanding COVID pathology and developing therapeutics
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Technical background: biomaterials engineering, implantables, cell culture, space tech
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Passionate about space synthetic biology, extraterrestrial habitat development, and sustainable space exploration
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Hardware engineer & artist
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Currently in high school, taking all his classes @ Harvard & MIT
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Research @ MIT Media Lab & MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Science
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Organizer @ MIT Reality Hack
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Technical Background: XR, CAD, electronics, drones
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Previous experience in autonomous drones, BCI, and XR Hardware design
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Exited startup community non-profit founder
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Economics @ Harvard College, multiple drop out
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Founding team @ Cerebral Valley, the largest AI community in SF
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Co-founded the largest student-run COVID research non-profit, Erevna.us, before raising over $1m and exiting a crypto exchange, DAOHQ.co
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Running the Harvard Hacker House, c-house
Join the organizer team!
If you are interested in joining the organizer team, please email contact@augmentationlab.org.
Apply here
Fill out this 15min form - https://tinyurl.com/auglabresidency2024.
Applications will be reviewed in batches on a rolling basis. First review cycle starting April 2.
FAQ
Can you provide a visa?
It will be difficult for us to provide visa sponsorships. We might be able to try to work with our partners to find a solution, so you should apply regardless. Please point out in the application that you will need a visa.
Is this program neurotech-focused?
This year's summer residency centers around creating personal AI. While there is room for biosignal-informed personal AI, neurotech specifically is not the focus of this residency.
Is this only for students? I wonder if I might be a bit further along in my career.
No, the residency is not only for students. We highly encourage applications by professionals of all ages. Eventually, we are looking for the most passionate, skillful, thoughtful, and likable hackers. However, note that we will only support residents with a student-like lifestyle (so if you're used to fancy tech salaries... that's not it). We believe the residency will provide a far more valuable opportunity for the right people.
2023 Augmentation Residency
Our previous residency was a 2.5-month long program for 8 creative technologists in San Francisco. We received over 200 applications for 4 spots, $55k in funding, and >$25k in equipment donations.
Following the residency, our participants have joined Apple, Entrepreneur First, MIT Media Lab, and innovative startups Osmo AI (giving AI smell) and Lorentz bio (neurocryopreservation R&D).
Our experiences organizing the residency will be presented as a case study at the prime conference on human-computer interaction, CHI 2024 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems).