Join the Augmentation Summer Residency for Personal & Wearable AI!

Apply here: https://tinyurl.com/auglabresidency2024

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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 of all ages passionate about building local and open-source LLMs, generative AI/agent architectures, wearable electronics, edge computing, human-computer interaction, and sustainable technology development.

We will provide a platform for experimentation, exploration, and development. As a participant, 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.

Why – Theme

We are moving towards a future of machine-human 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 & Personal AI will focus on making AI context-aware, applicable to real problems, and ethically developed.

What – Program

Expected outputs

• Hardware products – with a particular push for open-source hardware; e.g., Raspberry Pi for wearable AI
• AI-based consumer software; e.g., personal AI agents based on journal notes and text messages
• AI infrastructure software; e.g., modular building blocks for building local LLMs on embedded devices
• Integrated hardware-software AI wearables for specific applications; e.g., consumer AI wearables for people with learning disabilities

​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.

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Education 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 an understanding of:​

• Rapid prototyping
• Design thinking and product management: problem validation
• Selling products
• Startup models of the future
• Transdisciplinary thinking
• Societal implications of the technologies we are building
• Leveraging power dynamics
• Crafting a purpose-driven career

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Technical learning

We believe in learning by doing 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 fellows to deliver workshops on what they are skilled in.

We expect the residency will include the following technologies:

• Fullstack AI Architectures for Web and Mobile Apps
• Fine-Tuning & Local Machine Learning Techniques
• “Memory” Architectures (Embedding Databases, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Knowledge Graphs)
• Prompting and Prompt-Chaining
• Multi-Agent Systems
• Embedded Programming and Edge Computing
• Electronics and PCB Design
• Product Design and Fabrication

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Who – Organizer team

All team members are co-founders of the Augmentation Lab. They are transdisciplinary developers who have been building generative AI applications, AI wearables, and multi-agent 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, human-computer interaction, tech policy, startup scaling, and product management.

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Join the organizer team!

If you are interested in joining the organizer team, please email contact@augmentationlab.org.

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Apply here

Fill out this 15min form – https://tinyurl.com/auglabresidency2024.​

Applications will be processed on a rolling basis.

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FAQ

Please note that 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.

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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.