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Transhumanist Hacker

Inventing the Future

I work to interface with and enhance the human mind.

Cayden is a researcher, engineer, and creative at the MIT Media Lab. His research lies at the nexus of human-computer interaction, sensing, and consciousness. Cayden explores systems that become part of the cognitive self – augmenting, extending, and enhancing human thinking, sensing, and communication.

 

By combining skills and insights in engineering, sensing, psychology, and neuroscience, Cayden uses tech like wearables, neurotech, and AI to create systems which augment the human experience. These include contextual search engine smart glasses, using the “Human Eye as a Camera” with brain-computer interfaces, social wearables for autism, augmented musical experiences with brain stimulation, and other projects.

 

Cayden previously contributed to interdisciplinary projects at university research labs, startups, and companies including University of Toronto, National University of Singapore, JITX, and Blueberry.

 

Cayden’s also considered an expert in all-day wearable smart glasses. He leads TeamOpenSmartGlasses, co-founded the H20 Smart Glasses Community, and demos smart glasses in videos.

We are all cyborgs: intelligent biological agents upgraded by the technology we create. I seek to exist as and develop the next generation of human intelligence and experiential enhancement.

– Cayden Pierce

Research

MIT, UofT, NUS; IEEE, ACM

Keynotes – ACM WearSys, IEEE Sensors

Featured Project: Wolfram Summer School

Talks/Media

Talks – UofT, Yale, IEEE

Stephen Wolfram Shoutout

Interview, AR Show Podcast

Adventure

Cybernetic mobile lab road trip

Camped in Wolfram Research parking lot

Homeless “minimal tech” experiments

FEATURED PROJECTS

Human Eye as a Camera
Wearable Computer

A wearable brain-computer interface that can scan the visual cortex and recreate an image of whatever the subject is looking at.

Mobilab: 40 Year Old RV
Mobile Hacker Lab

A 40 year old RV converted into a mobile hacker lab for wearable computing adventures across North America.

person_abstraction_tree_wss22_CaydenPierce

Extracting Linguistic Relations from Word
Embeddings & LLMs

(king – man + woman) == (queen) | But what else is there to discover in semantic latent space? We explored the high dimensional space of word embeddings and large language models (LLMs) to discover how semantic meaning is represented in vector space in a human-understandable way.

ABOUT ME

I’m a hacker. The system I hack is mind. I poke, prod, optimise, and enhance the mind to create intelligent and sensed experiences we never had before.

My philosophy is “more life”. I live this philosophy by having as much fun as possible, not only creating new experiences in the lab, but by going out into the world on “inventures” (adventure + invention), blending together research, sociality, work, learning, invention, etc. This could be as simple as heading to a coffee shop donned with a wearable contextual search engine, as fringe as living in the woods during my undergrad, or as in-depth as a cross-continent road trip in a cybernetic vehicular research lab.

I believe we’re entering an era of rapid growth in intelligence, and advancing HCI is the best way to ensure a future where all minds flourish maximally – a future more fantastic than we can possibly imagine.

I build meta-tools. I offer meta-solutions to meta-problems. My goal is goals. I aim to encourage and enable.

We need to shed old functions handed to us by biological evolution and live new values which maximise our shared conscious experience. Let’s create a future more fantastic than we can possibly imagine today – and bring every mind along for the ride.

Please feel free to reach out.