Building in the New Spatial Intelligence Era | Spatial Frontier Club x Mission Robotics
About the Event
SFC and Mission Robotics are bringing the community together for another evening of Spatial Intelligence in San Francisco!
Over the past few months, the Spatial Intelligence landscape has been moving quickly. A new wave of models and tools is making capabilities across 3D generation, reconstruction, spatial reasoning, world modeling, and interaction with physical environments increasingly accessible.
For researchers and builders across World Models, Robotics, 3D, Computer Vision, and Physical AI, this creates a new set of questions around what these capabilities actually unlock, how existing workflows and research directions may change, and where the hardest problems still remain.
This gathering is designed for researchers, engineers, founders, and builders to share recent work, exchange ideas, and discuss what this shift means for the broader Spatial Intelligence ecosystem.
The evening will combine short technical talks, open discussion, and networking. Come with a project to share, a question to explore, or simply an interest in what others are building.
Who Should Attend
Spatial Intelligence
World Models
Robotics & Physical AI
Robot Learning & Embodied AI
3D Generative AI
Computer Vision & Multimodal AI
Computer Graphics
Neural Rendering & Gaussian Splatting
Simulation & Digital Twins
XR & Spatial Computing
We welcome researchers, engineers, technical artists, founders, product leaders, investors, students, and ecosystem builders whose work touches these areas.
Event Format
5:30 PM – 6:15 PM
Arrival, networking, food & drinks
6:15 PM – 7:30 PM
SFC & Mission Robotics welcome, speaker talks and technical sharing
7:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Open discussion and audience Q&A
8:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Community mixer and networking
Featured Speakers
1. Salman Shahid from Google DeepMind
Salman Shahid is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, working on Embodied Reasoning. His research focuses on training robot policies with high dexterity while preserving the generalization capabilities of underlying models. Before joining Google DeepMind, he conducted independent research on Stanford’s BEHAVIOR robotics challenge, fine-tuning Physical Intelligence’s π0.5 VLA model.
His work found that proprioceptive dropout can significantly improve policy robustness, while receding-horizon control outperformed temporal ensemble methods, improving door navigation success from 30% to 100%.
2. Hokin Deng from Carnegie Mellon University
Hokin Deng is a researcher working on video reasoning AI, studying how machines can understand and predict the physical world from video. He leads VBVR, a large-scale video model benchmark spanning 56 authors across 32 universities, which reached #1 on Hugging Face and was named Paper of the Month, alongside publications at ICML. He previously conducted research in cognitive science and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26105
3. Jake Fitzgerald Creator of text-to-cad
Jake has spent the past six months exploring agentic hardware design at South Park Commons. He created text-to-cad, an open-source project with 16K GitHub stars and 200K downloads, equipping AI agents with tools for 3D modeling, simulation, manufacturability checks, and robot planning.
Using these tools, he designed and built a six-degree-of-freedom robot arm—without any prior experience building robots. In this talk, he’ll share the possibilities and practical challenges of using LLMs to design and build hardware.
Previously, Jake co-founded Derive Labs, a crypto options exchange, and worked as a software engineer at WhatsApp.
4. Andrey Gizdov from OpenVector
Andrey Gizdov is the CEO and Co-Founder of OpenVector, a YC-backed startup building Vision-Language-Action (VLA) infrastructure for the physical world. OpenVector develops the world's fastest vision language model inference for real time video understanding, and uses it to automate processes in factories, wet labs, robotics, and physical businesses. OpenVector works with some of the largest gas stations and mining operations in the nation. It provides observability, automation, and guidance for frontline workers.
Andrey spent 1.5 years at Harvard before dropping out of a Fulbright PhD scholarship. He's worked on compute-efficient and chain-of-thought multimodal models at labs in Harvard, MIT, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. His academic work on vision models and spatial reasoning has been published at CVPR, ECCV, and AAAI.
Call for Speakers
We’re currently inviting speakers to share recent research, technical demos, and insights from their work.
We’re especially interested in work exploring how recent advances in spatial models and tooling are changing what’s possible across World Models, Robotics, 3D, Spatial Reasoning, Simulation, and Physical AI.
Interested in speaking? Select the “Speaker” option when registering on Luma and include a brief description of your proposed topic. You’re welcome to add a link to a paper, project, or demo.
We’ll follow up with selected speakers to discuss the session.
About the Hosts
Spatial Frontier Club
Spatial Frontier Club is a Bay Area community connecting researchers, founders, investors, and builders working across Spatial Intelligence, World Models, Robotics, Embodied AI, Simulation, 3D technology, and Physical AI.
Mission Robotics is building the beating heart of robotics in the Mission, bringing together the leading builders, founders, and mad scientists making embodied AI a reality. If your robot got you kicked out of a WeWork, we want you here.
Registration
This is a curated gathering with limited capacity.
Please register using your current affiliation and include a short note about your work or interest in the event themes. Priority may be given to applicants whose backgrounds are closely aligned with the discussion.
✦ Spatial Frontier Club
Join a growing community of researchers, founders, engineers, and investors building the future of Spatial Intelligence and Physical AI.
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LinkedIn: Spatial Frontier Club
X: @SpaceFronClub
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Contact: spatialfrontierclub@gmail.com