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: Research-Grounded AI Agents
Kalpit Dixit is the founder of Paper Lantern. Previously, he was a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS Bedrock, where he led teams delivering trillions of pretraining tokens, RAG capabilities, and multiple AI products into GA. Earlier, he was a high-frequency options trader at Optiver. MS Stanford, BS+MS IIT Bombay.
Paper Lantern tackles a deceptively simple question: what changes when an AI agent can actually use the world's research literature? Today's coding and chat agents are stuck at the state of their training data — even with web search, they default to the standard playbook. Paper Lantern's MCP server distills 2M+ research papers into structured, agent-readable form, surfacing methods, tradeoffs, benchmarks, and implementation guidance directly into the reasoning loop of any coding or chat agent. In a head-to-head case study with Karpathy's autoresearch framework, the Paper Lantern-equipped agent reached 3.2% lower validation loss than the same agent without it (gap still widening at the 2-hour mark), achieved 10% lower training cost, and showed the same gains continuing at 100x pretraining compute.
REVIEW THE PRE-READ HERE
Talk #2: TO BE ANNOUNCED
Talk #3: TO BE ANNOUNCED
📝 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.
Pebblebed is a seed-stage venture firm backing the foundational layers of technological progress — developer platforms, AI systems, simulation engines, and formal verification. Founded in 2022 by Pamela Vagata (OpenAI, Facebook, Stripe) and Keith Adams (Facebook AI Research, Slack), Pebblebed backs technically elite founders building work that compounds over time.
