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Alif Jakir

Omnidisciplinary inventor

philosopher–scientist–futurist

Hi, I’m Alif—welcome to my site. My work sits at the intersection of artificial and organic intelligence: how minds arise in neural and machine substrates, and how we can design systems that amplify critical thinking and partnership with humans rather than substituting for them. The full layout, contact links, and research sections load with the interactive site.

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Assembling pixels and promises.

AboutPart 10 of 10

Affiliations & Community

MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces, MIT Reality Hack (2022–2026), Augmentiv Labs, Halcyox → ΣIG, GDSC, advising roles, and open source.

This page maps the people and institutions where the ideas on the current work and research pages meet deadlines I did not set and rooms I did not build alone.

Superintelligent Group (ΣIG)

I founded and run Superintelligent Group. Before ΣIG consolidated the thread, most of this work lived under Halcyox—a distributed advanced HCI R&D company I started that eventually absorbed every other project on the calendar. Halcyox built client products (websites, AI tools, infrastructure), incubated hardware prototypes, and served as the engineering team behind projects like the Society of Scientists hackathon win. When the focus tightened to supercoordination and human–machine teams, Halcyox became ΣIG.

MIT Media Lab — Fluid Interfaces

Affiliated researcher since 2022. The Fluid Interfaces group does interdisciplinary work on cognition, augmentation, and interfaces that refuse to pick a single discipline—which is why my threads land there. My active contributions:

  • AI Civilizations — multi-agent coordination research, supercoordination experiments, and failure-mode documentation.
  • Codrawer — a sketch-native co-drawing interface: reMarkable Paper Pro streams stylus events to a FastAPI/WebSocket router; an AI emits -layer vector strokes on a separate layer. The AI only fires on stroke_end (debounced, ~50 RPM rate limit), and user ink is never overwritten.
  • Neural Assemblies — in collaboration with the Poggio Lab (CBMM) and Daniel Mitropolsky. Fluid Interfaces is the institutional home; the research itself spans computational neuroscience and linguistics.

The lab's broader work on Dormio (targeted dream incubation), AttentivU (Kos'myna & Maes's EEG+EOG attention-sensing glasses), and thoughtful computing informs the ambient context I design in—even projects I did not directly build.

MIT Reality Hack (2022–2026)

Five consecutive years as a builder. Each hackathon compressed months of learning about hardware integration, team coordination under , and the gap between demo and product into a few intense days:

  • 2022 — Moodspace: first hack, first exposure to XR hardware at scale.
  • 2023 — Life in Between XR: Android AR transit-discovery app integrating ARCore, ArcGIS, Google Maps, and a 659K-line Boston mesh on mobile. Semifinalist. Five coordinate systems, one phone.
  • 2024 — Conflict mediation MR: mixed-reality de-escalation prototype.
  • 2025 — OpenGalea: colocated multiplayer neuro-MR. OpenBCI Cyton EEG + modified Ultracortex Mark IV + Meta Quest 3. Random Forest on alpha/beta band power, trained on ~113K samples, Lab Streaming Layer → Python → UDP → Unity. Meta track winner. ~$1,800/user for the rig.
  • 2026 — Personoid / De-Escalate: XR humanoid robot telepresence. DeepMind prize.

Reality Hack is how I went from running the Google Developer Student Club to the MIT Media Lab pipeline. The 2022 hack is the inflection point in the origins story.

Augmentiv Labs & OpenLabOS

Collaboration on a scientific reproducibility stack using smart glasses to make lab procedures verifiable and repeatable. The proprietary product (AugmentivLabOS) runs on K900 smart glasses: first-person capture, protocol-aware coaching, deterministic adherence policy (thresholds 0.85/0.60, deviation gates), and session manifests for replay.

I also helped architect OpenLabOS—the open-source (CC0), vendor-neutral evolution: a monorepo (pnpm TS + uv Python) with canonical Zod protocol schemas, domain modules (biotech, chemistry), device adapters (Android ADB, webcam, ROS2), and a four-plane architecture (presentation / coordination / reasoning / learning). Local-first, OpenTelemetry, reproducible event logs.

Advising roles

Doppel Labs — engineering and research advising. Wallace — same. These are ongoing relationships where I contribute architecture guidance and domain expertise, not full-time engineering.

DelightfulOS & wearable computing

DelightfulOS is an “Internet of Bodies” wearable OS I built for MIT Hardware Hack 2026: piezo collar (ESP32-S3, contact mic, ~200ms pre-speech intent detection) + AR glasses (Snap Spectacles adapter) + AI on a unified signal bus. Per-user state estimation (speech intent, stress, engagement), Gemini Live bidirectional audio, and a 5D hardware design language (body site, signal ecology, output, intelligence class, temporal scope). The architecture is ROS-style signal/action bus with ephemeral and durable channels.

Clarkson & TARS Lab

Clarkson University (2019–2023) — undergrad. Dual degree in Computer Science and Business Intelligence & Data Analytics, minors in robotics and math. Research at the Terascale All-Sensing Research Studio (TARS) under Sean and Natasha Banerjee: XR, computer vision, robotics, and ML on real hardware. Shipped two quadcopters (Pi 4 + Navio2 + ArduPilot), a VR piano-learning capture pipeline (Azure Kinect + MediaPipe → HDF5 → Unity), and published at AIxVR (Best Demo).

Google Developer Student Club (lead/organizer, Jun 2021–May 2023) — semester roadmaps, workshops on web/cloud/XR, speakers, and a culture where people went from curiosity to a demo. The club brought me to MIT Reality Hack 2022; Reality Hack brought me to the Media Lab.

DTU (Denmark, 2023) — nanofabrication and photonics. Cleanroom contact hours that later showed up at FabuBlox when the domain stopped being hypothetical.

Hackathon wins & team builds

  • Society of Scientists (1st place, AGI House × Sundai AI Agents Hackathon @ MIT) — multi-agent grant proposal generator with 13+ agents via AG2, AI21 Jamba, and Exa literature search. Team: Dünya Baradari, Alif Jakir, Elior Benarous, Igor Sadalski.
  • Fabulous Fables (HUMIC Fall 2023) — AI children's book generator combining LangChain + Stable Diffusion + LLaMA-2. I led the dev team, built CI/CD, and shared NVIDIA Inception AWS credits so the team could generate Sandzan desert fables.
  • MIT Reality Hack wins — see above (Meta track 2025, DeepMind prize 2026).

Open source

github.com/Caerii has ~270+ repositories. Open source, for me, is the unpolished record of building in public, rough edges included. I maintain circuit-tracer on PyPI, publish neural-assemblies as a package, and keep the ΣIG architecture docs open for inspection. The engineering page has the curated reading path; the repo index is the unfiltered record.