Who? A kid who never stopped asking why the rules of a world exist. What? This site, part lab notebook, part philosophy draft, part engineering log. Why? Because the largest questions and the smallest commits both change what we dare to build. If you are new here, this page is the longer answer to those three words.
Background
I am Bengali-American: أ, א, 阿利夫, আলিফ. The hyphen is load-bearing. Growing up between cultures taught me translation early, between languages, between value systems, between people who see the same problem from completely different frames. I think that is what civilizations are at bottom: unlike minds sharing a world long enough for something worth tending to grow. That instinct still shows up in how I think about human-machine interfaces and cross-agent coordination. It started much earlier and much less formally than any job title suggests.
Computers, virtual worlds, and the first intuitions
I have had computers since elementary school. By middle school, Minecraft and other virtual worlds had become something like a second place to think: building, exploring, coordinating with strangers who shared a map. I learned systems thinking by running servers, writing mods, and watching behavior in worlds thousands of people shaped at once. I also learned, less happily, about attention traps and toxic dynamics. Both sides stayed with me.
The intuition I carried out of that period is simple, and it still guides me. Machines are symbiotic, not substitutive. A well-designed tool makes you smarter while you use it. A badly designed one flatters you into thinking you do not need to learn anything. I have been chasing the first kind ever since.
Clarkson, TARS Lab, and the formal start
I studied at Clarkson University (2019 to 2023), dual degree in Computer Science and Business Intelligence & Data Analytics, with minors in robotics and math. The research side lived at the Terascale All-Sensing Research Studio (TARS) with Sean and Natasha Banerjee: XR, computer vision, robotics, and ML on real hardware in real rooms. I built flying quadcopters on Raspberry Pi 4 and Navio2 boards, processed depth from Azure Kinects for a VR piano-learning system, and learned that sensors in creative ways when you bolt them onto things that move.
In parallel I ran the Google Developer Student Club as lead and organizer for two years. Semester roadmaps, workshops, speakers, and a culture where people went from curiosity to a demo they could show someone. That club is how I found MIT Reality Hack, and Reality Hack redirected much of what came after.
Denmark, cleanrooms, and the physical turn
A semester at DTU in Denmark (2023) added nanofabrication and photonics: less JavaScript, more cleanroom. That is why “physical world” is not a metaphor on this site. When you etch a wafer, there is no undo. The decisions that matter are the ones you make before material is committed, and the tools that help you think before you commit are the ones worth building.
Science fiction, Bostrom, and the philosophical turn
Science fiction set the scale first for me: The Culture, Hitchhiker's Guide, Orion's Arm, SCP. Banks and short stories came before the question of whether any of it could be made real. Bostrom's Superintelligence in high school turned “could” into “will, and sooner than you think.” College brought GPT-2 and then GPT-3 in earnest, and the philosophy questions arrived in plaintext: who gets to speak with authority, who owns what is created, how communities make sense together when the tools start generating the content.
MIT Media Lab, Reality Hack, and ΣIG
I have been an affiliated researcher at the MIT Media Lab, Fluid Interfaces group, for several years: cognition, embodied interfaces, and work that refuses to sit in a single discipline. I have done MIT Reality Hack every year from 2022 to 2026. That lineage includes OpenGalea (EEG-driven multiplayer MR on Quest 3, 2025 Meta track winner), a holographic Cortana installation at the MIT Museum, and a 2026 DeepMind prize. Each year taught me something papers struggle to capture: how hardware fails at 3 AM, how strangers coordinate under a deadline, how demo pressure strips an idea down to what actually works in the room.
Now I run Superintelligent Group (ΣIG). Most software still pictures a lone operator at a screen. The work I care about is collaborative and embodied, spread across rooms and years. I want to build interfaces for that.
Calibration
Not everything here is solemn. I think you should know that before you mistake the tone. I built a dating website for worms (swipe-based, vibes-only chat; birds are asked to leave). I prompted AI-generated dialogues that someone later staged at an off-Broadway theater in Brooklyn. I co-authored a Library of Babel with GPT-3 with demo credentials o@o / 12345. I named an educational tutor Planck and taught it to say “ has left the chat” while refusing to do your homework.
I take the large questions seriously. I also take play seriously. The same person writes both. Calibrate accordingly, and tell me if I miss the mark.
Why this site
My path has moved from play toward formal tools, toward philosophy, toward building and shipping, and back toward philosophy with better questions. This site is the open notebook for that loop: a deliberate counterweight to perfectionism, raw edges included. The rest of the About series goes deeper on philosophy, cosmos, research, current work, civics, engineering, lenses, reading, and affiliations. If you find bugs, tell me.