The Bay Area Frontier Research Club is a curated forum for rigorous discussion on how AI is reshaping the scientific research process. We convene experimental researchers, computational scientists, and research engineers across domains to examine concrete work—papers, methods, and workflows—covering literature synthesis, hypothesis generation, experimental design, simulation, analysis, and reproducibility.
For each session, we curate 2–3 papers selected for rigor and discussion value. Presentations are intentionally brief so the majority of time is reserved for questions and critique: assumptions, evaluation methodology, failure modes, and what would constitute convincing evidence. Papers and supporting materials are shared in advance to ensure a high-baseline conversation.
🕒 Agenda
5:30pm: Doors open5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + snacks6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking
🎙️ Presenters & topics
Talk #1: Data Movement and What It Means for AI Inference
Mochamad Asri is a researcher at NVIDIA working at the intersection of computer architecture and machine learning systems. He earned his PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering at UT Austin, where his dissertation tackled one of the least glamorous and most consequential problems in computing: how to move data efficiently across heterogeneous hardware.
The field talks about scaling in terms of FLOPs and parameters — but the real bottleneck for AI inference is increasingly not computation, it's data movement. Getting weights and activations to the right place at the right time, across memory hierarchies and accelerators, is what actually governs latency, cost, and throughput at scale. In this talk, Mochamad makes the case that understanding data movement is the key to understanding inference economics: which design choices move the ceiling, which only move efficiency, and why the gap between peak hardware capability and real-world performance is so often a memory problem rather than a compute one. For anyone building, serving, or paying for agentic systems, this is the layer underneath the layer.
REVIEW THE PRE-READ HERE
Talk #2: TBA
Talk #3: TBA
📝 Want to present your work?
If you have a research paper you’d like to discuss with a cross-disciplinary room, submit it for consideration.
SUBMIT YOUR PAPER HERE.
👥 Who should attend
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Experimental researchers
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Computational scientists across domains (bio/chem/materials/climate/neuro/physics)
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Research engineers + lab automation people
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Those building tools for literature review, experiment planning, robotics, simulation, or scientific data
If you’ve ever wished research moved faster, you belong here.
Capacity is limited.
We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed and recorded, and to the use of those images and clips by the organizers on social media and other event marketing channels.
🌐 Connect with Frontier Research Club
• Luma Calendar: luma.com/frontiersyndicate• Youtube: youtube.com/@FrontierResearchClub• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/frontier-research-club• Instagram: @frontierresearchclub• Email: [email protected]
🤝 Hosted by
Frontier Syndicate is a venture community connecting frontier tech researchers, builders, and investors through curated convenings and early-stage capital. Across the Bay Area, we host a recurring series of research forums, builder nights, and intimate investor dinners — and back exceptional companies emerging from the labs, communities, and technical networks we convene.Hexo Labs is a neolab for recursive self-improving AI. Their open-source SIA framework is the first to update both the harness AND the model weights of a task-specific agent in the same self-improvement loop — clearing state-of-the-art results across multiple domain benchmarks. Hexo backs the broader research community through grants and direct collaboration on hard problems in science and engineering.