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§ 03 — CREW & INSTITUTIONAL DOSSIER

the crew

Founded 2019. Quiet 2022–2024. Revived January 6, 2026. Below: who we are, the cohort timeline, the current team and alumni, our institutional partners, and how to reach us.

§ 03.A — About us

Who we are

AI Skunkworks is one of the most active graduate student units at Northeastern for research and builds in modern AI. We give students a platform to ship real work — not just coursework — in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. Founded 2019, quiet through 2022–2024, revived January 2026 — the mission hasn't moved.

Formed under the guidance of Professor Nik Bear Brown (Computer Science Ph.D., UCLA). He remains faculty advisor, bringing 10+ years of AI/ML industry experience to guide researchers. Students learn the stack, then lead the next cohort — a knowledge-transfer loop. Core principle: learn by doing.

We prefer real problems over theory theater. Active collaborations include Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital on computational biology research. In-house work spans visual analytics, causal inference, model interpretability, and the rest of the active divisions on the projects board.

§ 03.B — Year archives

Cohort timeline

2019 — founding cohort

AI Skunkworks launched at Northeastern as a student-led collective for experimental ML work outside the formal curriculum.

2020 — early expansion

Second cohort grows the research groups and early project files. Remote-year adaptations begin as campus operations shift.

2021 — project density

Peak pre-quiet activity: Explainable AI deployments, competition work, and mentorship pairings across Khoury and allied labs.

2022–2024 — quiet period

Operations paused while founders graduated and projects went dormant. The name and mission persisted informally.

2025 — recon phase

Informal reconvening among alumni and faculty ahead of the formal 2026 revival. Charter drafts and division outlines circulate privately.

2026 — revival cohort

Officially revived January 6, 2026. New command structure, new projects, roster filling in as crews spin up.

§ 03.B.1 — Legacy sites

Earlier homes on the web

Before this site, AI Skunkworks lived at two other addresses. Both are kept up as a record of the earlier cohorts and their projects.

§ 03.C — Operating principle

How we operate

PRINCIPLE · 01

Open by default

Research, code, and failures get published, not just wins. The postmortem is part of the deliverable.

PRINCIPLE · 02

Small teams, real stakes

No busywork. Every project ships or dies visibly — short loops, honest status, no slide-deck theater.

PRINCIPLE · 03

Mentorship over hierarchy

Faculty and industry mentors advise, they don't gatekeep. If you carry a project, you're crew.

§ 03.D — Team

The team

Faculty advisor

Prof. Nik Bear Brown

Ph.D. Computer Science, UCLA · advising AI Skunkworks since 2019

Founded the unit with its first cohort and has guided every one since. Sets strategic direction, brings 10+ years of AI/ML industry experience, and keeps the learn-by-doing loop honest.

LinkedIn

Current members

Alumni

People who carried the revival and have since moved on. Once crew, always crew.

  • Vanshi VP Technology 2026
  • Ratan VP Marketing 2026
  • Je Sai Kailash VP Research Operations Apr – Aug 2026
  • Natnicha VP Operations Jan – Apr 2026

§ 03.E — Institutional partners

Allied units

  • Khoury College of Computer Sciences
  • Northeastern AI Initiative
  • Student clubs & project teams
  • Humanitarians AI
  • Harvard / Boston Children's Hospital
  • MA AI Hub
  • The Open Accelerator

Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Faculty sponsorship and lab space through Prof. Nik Bear Brown's research group.

Northeastern AI Initiative

Cross-college alignment on student AI research and demo days.

Student clubs & project teams

Ad-hoc collaborations with robotics, software, and entrepreneurship groups on campus.

Humanitarians AI

501(c)(3) institutional and fiscal partner for the revived unit.

Harvard / Boston Children's Hospital

Clinical and research collaborations spanning interpretability and decision support.

MA AI Hub

Regional ecosystem partner — joint public events including Boston Tech Week.

The Open Accelerator

Cross-org hack-jam collaborator (Red Hat × IBM × MA AI Hub) for Seaport builds.

§ 03.E.1 — Field reports

What skunks say.

Tanvi Modi · MS Information Design & Visualization

Hues & Tones taught me how to translate design concepts for a developer audience — the bridge between Figma and the model output.

Yuhang Li · MS Engineering Management & Data Mining

Through Hues & Tones I learned to weigh visual impact alongside model interpretability — taste and metrics in the same loop.

Ziwei Fan · Research Software Engineer, Mass General Hospital · 2019 skunk

An ML interpretability project with Prof. Nik Bear Brown became the story that impressed a future manager in interviews — the work traveled.

Ayush Singh · MS Computer & Data Science

Prof. Nik Bear has been a mentor across multiple projects — the kind of advising that compounds over a degree, not a semester.

Pramod Pai · MS Information Systems

The Explainable AI group led directly to work with Squark.ai — student research that survived contact with production.

§ 03.F — Support the unit

Back the work

Skunkworks runs on GPU credits, spare parts, pizza, and alumni who remember what it was like to build without a budget line. Help us stand up dedicated compute.

Support on HuskyStarter →

§ 03.G — Contact

Reach the unit

Primary contact is email, with Discord and Substack for announcements. Pick the channel that matches what you need.

Join the roster

Open to anyone at Northeastern willing to do the work. Tell us who you are and what you want to build — it takes a few minutes.

Fill in the membership form