Circuit Launch Brew Review # 2 SF Tech Week Edition: Built Across Borders
One paper. Three robots. One brew (We want to say beer but some people disagree with drinking beer at 11am, apparently)
Brew Review is a reading group with robots on the floor — one paper worth arguing about, real hardware running a few feet away, and a drink in your hand while you talk to the people who built it.
For SF Tech Week we're taking it to the War Memorial Veterans Building, next to City Hall, inside The Future of Tech's Global Innovation Showcase. The showcase spans a wide mix of topics. Our room is the one space in the building that is entirely embodied AI.
Embodied AI, Built Across Borders. Robotics doesn't get built in one country anymore — the research, the hardware, the supply chain and the deployment are spread across the Pacific and back. That's the thread running through the paper, the demos, and the conversations over lunch.
The format
One Paper — a 25-minute walkthrough and open Q&A. Read it beforehand if you can; nobody checks.
Short bio
Alistair Pernigo is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Timeless Way, a San Francisco-based technology company and research lab developing sensing systems and AI to help machines perceive and understand the chemical world. His work grew out of a lifelong fascination with sensory perception and how other species experience their surroundings. He is a co-author of SmellNet, published at ICLR 2026, and a 2026 O’Shaughnessy Fellow.
PaperSmellNet: A Large-scale Dataset for Real-world Smell Recognition - Read the paper
Summary
SmellNet explores how machines can learn to recognize smells from portable gas sensors. It introduces an open dataset covering 50 substances and 43 mixtures, alongside ScentFormer, an AI model that learns from how sensor signals change over time. The work gives researchers a shared foundation for training and comparing machine-olfaction systems, helping move chemical sensing toward practical applications.
Three Robots — three live demos, ten minutes each, on real hardware. Not video, not slides.
Rokae
VCycene Inc.
Osmos (Formerly Neuralzome)
One Brew — Snack, drinks, hands-on time with the robots, and introductions to the people you actually came to meet.
Agenda
10:30 AM — Doors open Robots live on the floor from the start. Come early and get hands on them before the room fills.
11:10 AM — Welcome Opening remarks and how the afternoon runs.
11:30 AM — One Paper 25-minute walkthrough plus Q&A.
12:10 PM — Three Robots Three 10-minute live demos, back to back.
12:45 PM — One Brew drinks, hands-on time with the hardware, and curated introductions.
1:30 PM — Group photo and toast
2:00 PM — Close
Who should come
Researchers, founders, engineers, investors, and operators working on embodied AI and robotics — plus anyone at the Global Innovation Showcase who'd rather spend three hours with working hardware than a booth crawl.
Come for the paper. Stay for the robots. Meet the people behind the work.
Hosted by Circuit Launch · Part of SF Tech Week Inside The Future of Tech — Global Innovation Showcase, 401 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco