§ 04 — Field Operations
Hackathons, speaker nights, workshops, hack-jams, and the occasional unscheduled all-nighter. Collaborative events with partner orgs and solo runs by the unit. Public log below — intake terminal at the bottom.
§ 04.A — Upcoming Operations
Active intake. RSVP via Discord.
48 hours. Multiple tracks including a dedicated agentic-browser track sponsored by Perplexity featuring Comet. Cross-tab research agents, productivity automation, and accessibility builds. Prizes, mentors, and the usual late-night pizza calculus. Open to all Northeastern students.
Quarterly speaker series. Bringing in researchers from frontier labs and adjacent institutions. Past speakers from Anthropic, MIT, Mass General, and Squark.ai. Date and lineup announced via Discord.
Joint build session with a partner organization. Active conversations include The Open Accelerator (Red Hat × IBM × MA AI Hub) and their hackathon series in Boston Seaport, plus other regional collaborators. Format TBD. Watch Discord for the date drop.
§ 04.B — Recent Operations
An AI Skunkworks original — format and specifics being locked in. A summer field operation that leans into what the unit does best: bring people into the room, give them a real problem, leave space for the bug to become the discovery. Theme, lineup, venue, and date drop together once the working group greenlights. Watch Discord.
Joint event with the Massachusetts AI Hub during Boston Tech Week. Skunks ran a demo and discussion table covering ongoing research from the Causal Inference and Explainable AI divisions, plus open-floor Q&A on student-led AI research at Northeastern. First major public appearance for the revived unit.
The unit went operational again. New charter ratified, six divisions stood up, intake reopened, Discord pinged for the first time in two years. Affiliation with Humanitarians AI formalized as the institutional partner. The 2022–2024 quiet period ends here.
§ 04.C — Standing Formats
Two major hackathons per year plus smaller internal jams each semester. Sometimes with sponsors, sometimes purely internal.
Monthly talks from industry researchers, faculty, and frontier-lab alumni. Open to the broader Northeastern community.
Five-minute lightning talks on whatever a skunk is currently obsessed with. Low stakes, high yield.
Hands-on technical workshops led by division members or invited mentors. Topics rotate with the divisions' current focus.
Each division runs a weekly paper-reading session. Open to drop-ins. Schedule lives in Discord.
Joint events with the MA AI Hub, Boston Tech Week, Humanitarians AI, The Open Accelerator, and other regional partners. Format varies.
§ 04.D — Stay In The Loop
Event announcements go to Discord first, then Substack, then everywhere else. RSVPs open ~2 weeks out. Use the intake terminal below to introduce yourself and get pinged.