​The robotics crowd is back at Mission Robotics.

​The Embodied AI track is a monthly research forum co-hosted with Mission Robotics, in their 8,500 sq ft brick-and-timber robotics facility in the heart of the Mission — a floor shared with more than a dozen robots.

​This session is built around one number: twenty watts. That's the power budget on which the human brain runs general embodied intelligence — perception, planning, dexterous control, all at once. The humanoid on our floor burns an order of magnitude more just walking across it. This session takes that gap from both directions: what biology's energy budget teaches AI, and what intelligence actually costs when you have to engineer it.

​The Frontier Research Club is a curated forum for rigorous, technical discussion at the frontier of AI. We convene researchers from the frontier labs, Stanford, Berkeley, and the teams building in production to examine concrete work — papers, methods, and results — with a bias toward assumptions, evaluation methodology, failure modes, and what would count as convincing evidence.

​Presentations are intentionally brief so the majority of time is reserved for questions and critique. Materials are shared in advance so the conversation starts at depth.

​Agenda

​5:30pm: Doors open
5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + light dinner
6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion
8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking

​Presenters & topics

​Talk 1 — What Biology's Energy Budget Teaches AI

​How do living neural circuits run embodied intelligence on twenty watts — and what does that architecture teach the systems we build?

​Marta's talk draws on fifteen years of work reverse-engineering how neural circuits represent and process information, including technology that writes activity directly into living circuits and watches them learn. The biological answer to the energy problem — sparse, adaptive computation that happens where information is stored — is the design brief her company now builds against.

​Marta Gajowa, PhD, is a neuroscientist (UC Berkeley, Adesnik Lab) and Founder & CEO of Neuraffica, which translates how living neuronal systems represent and process information into new AI solutions — beginning with AI vision for robotics and edge computing.

​Pre-read: Gajowa & Triplett, "Rapid learning," Nature Neuroscience — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40962967/

​Talk 2 — Silicon for the 20-Watt Budget: What a Watt of Inference Actually Buys

​When a model runs, where do the watts actually go? Mostly not into arithmetic — into moving bytes between memory and compute. That separation is the original sin of the von Neumann machine, and it's the reason silicon pays a price biology doesn't.

​Ezra's talk is a working silicon engineer's tour of inference energy: the memory wall, what bandwidth and precision really cost, and how far accelerator design — including computing in memory, biology's oldest trick — can close the gap toward the brain's budget. It ends where this room lives: what any of this means for the machines that have to act in the physical world.

​Ezra Wolf is a founding silicon engineer at Zettascale Computing, building accelerators for efficient AI inference — with three ASIC tapeouts behind him and a satellite he helped engineer, LEOPARDSat-1, currently in orbit. A Frontier Research Club regular across five sessions, tonight he crosses from the audience to the stage.

​Want to present your work?

​If you have a research paper you’d like to discuss at one of our next sessions, please submit it for consideration.

​Submit your paper here!

​Who should attend

• ​Robotics researchers and research engineers

• ​People training or deploying policies on real hardware — manipulation, humanoids, VLA, sim-to-real, world models

• ​Efficient-inference, edge, and systems people who count watts and milliseconds for a living

• ​Researchers curious about what neuroscience actually has to offer AI — and vice versa

• ​Founders and engineers building tooling for robot data, simulation, and evaluation

​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: /FrontierResearchClub

• ​LinkedIn: /frontier-research-club

• ​Instagram: @frontierresearchclub

• ​Email: kristopher@frontiersyndicate.vc

​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.

​Mission Robotics is 8,500 square feet in the heart of the Mission — a converted brick-and-timber factory, hardwired for hardware, where founders at the frontier of embodied AI build alongside more than a dozen robots. Home to humanoids, robot arms, a shared data-collection rig, and a frontier world model on tap, it's purpose-built for the people teaching machines to act in the physical world.