Frontier AI Research Club
We’re convening a small, curated group of Machine Learning & AI researchers for research presentations + discussion at AngelList HQ (San Francisco).
Agenda
5:30pm: Doors open
5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + snacks
6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion
8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking
Presenters & topics
Talk #1: Multi-Agent Strategies for Long-Context Reasoning (ICLR 2026)
Presenter: Zach Xu is a CS PhD candidate at the University of Chicago focused on building agentic systems, and is currently a Research Intern at Together AI in the Bay Area. His work centers on practical methods for making agents more reliable and effective at long-horizon tasks.
Talk #2: Measuring AI Code Sabotage: Building Realistic Control & Security Eval Environments
Presenter: Tyler Tracy is a Research Engineer at Redwood Research on the High-Stakes Control team, building evaluation environments and security protocols to prevent covert harmful actions by AI agents. He was a SERI MATS fellow and brings a deep software-engineering background to adversarial agent evaluation.
Talk #3: Accelerating Scientific Discovery with AI: Physics-Grounded Models and Faster Research Loops
Presenter: Richa Sharma is a quantum physicist and founder of QEM Labs, building physics foundation models for spatial intelligence. She earned her PhD in Physics from Emory University and has worked at the intersection of physics and AI across research and industry, including roles at LearnQuantum and OpenAI’s Red Teaming Network. Her work spans quantum simulation, ML safety evaluation, and practical ML systems for real-world deployment.
Talk #4: Catching Failures Early: Detecting Breakdown Signals in Multi-Turn AI Interactions
Presenter: Avinash Baidya is a Senior AI Research Scientist at Intuit, where he conducts foundational generative AI research and helps turn it into scalable, real-world product capabilities. He holds a PhD in Physics from UC Davis and has 7+ years of AI experience across academia and industry.
Talk #5: Bootstrapping Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning with RL (and How We Benchmark It Next)
Presenter: Sumeet Motwani is a PhD student at Oxford, where his research is funded by Eric Schmidt and advised by Philip Torr. His work focuses on RL post-training, multi-agent systems, and AI security. Sumeet has spent time at Microsoft Research and Google, and some of his previous work includes MALT, Secret Collusion, Agent Q, and h1.
Talk #6: AI Scientist Systems: Hypothesis Generation to Iterative Refinement
Presenter: Vignesh Baskaran is a machine learning practitioner who has built and trained large neural networks across text, vision, and audio. He previously led ML research at Darts-IP, where his state-of-the-art image recognition system contributed to the company’s acquisition by Clarivate, and he’s since ranked in the top ~1% on Kaggle while building open-source tooling for stabilizing large model training. He is the co-founder of Emily (MLE).
Talk #7: VLM Judges for Autonomous Driving: Reliable Evaluation in the Wild
Presenter: José M. Álvarez is a Director of AI Research at NVIDIA, leading the Autonomous Vehicle Applied Research team focused on scaling deep learning for autonomous driving. He previously did postdoctoral research in deep learning and computer vision at New York University with Yann LeCun, earned a PhD in computer science in Barcelona, and has completed executive education at Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Harvard Law School.
Who should attend
People doing serious Machine Learning & AI research work.
Capacity is limited.
We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion.
Hosted by
Emily (“MLE”) is an AI scientist and agentic machine-learning engineer that generates novel hypotheses, autonomously designs and runs experiments, critiques its own results, and iterates toward real progress on hard, unsolved problems. Built to augment researchers with agentic, closed-loop experimentation, Emily helps scientists reach the next frontier faster.
Frontier Syndicate is a private venture circle for frontier tech builders, researchers, and investors. We convene high-trust rooms and back exceptional companies at the frontier.
AngelList builds the software investors use to fund world-changing startups. Founders Cafe is our founder community and co-working space on the first floor of HQ.