A multi-year independent project building the Emergent — a vision system that learns to see from raw color and light, with no datasets, no backpropagation, and no borrowed features. Her one guide is coherence: the pull toward a world that hangs together. From that single drive she carves her own edges, her own color families, her own Umwelt.
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hi, I'm Dio.
syracuse university · jack kent cooke scholar
I'm a graduate of Onondaga Community College, where I pursued dual degrees in Computer Science and Electromechanical Technology. I completed my ELM degree at OCC and am now studying Computer Science at Syracuse University. I'm honored to be a recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship, which will support me as I continue my academic journey in AI and robotics.
My long-term goal is to pursue research in developmental robotics and artificial intelligence, with a focus on systems that explore and reflect the human condition. I'm passionate about building novel architectures that integrate embodiment and emotional cognition, and I'm excited to continue that work at SU.
To that end, I'm excited to announce that I'll be working as a Research Assistant for Link Lab @ SU under the tutelage of Dr. Jaime Banks. I'm also lucky to count Dr. Paulo Shakarian as a mentor, and I'm proud to be a small part of the monumental work that goes on at Leibnitz Lab.
Thank you to everyone who got me here, cheered me on, and kept me hungry for learning. I will make you all proud~!
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recent
- Incoming Research Assistant, Link Lab @ Syracuse University — Dr. Jaime Banks
- SOURCE-funded research — KAIROS, a coherence-based developmental vision system
- Psychomechia — live AI performance installation, Syracuse AI Summit 2026
- Midden — first place, UAI Winter Summit 2025
- Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship, cohort of '25
~ / about
about
name Dio Brown
handle sw13tch
studying Computer Science · Syracuse '28
prev A.A.S. Electromechanical Tech · OCC '25
scholar Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholar
lab Research Assistant · Link Lab @ SU (incoming)
training Leibnitz Lab · Dr. Shakarian
cert FANUC CERT Level 1 · OSHA 10-Hour
based Syracuse, NY
what i do
I work at the intersection of robotics and language models — specifically on systems that try to develop something resembling a self over time. My focus is developmental robotics: novel architectures that integrate embodiment with emotional cognition, where a machine has continuity of experience and builds its vocabulary from its own interior life rather than borrowing ours.
background
I came to AI through hardware. My first degree was an A.A.S. in Electromechanical Engineering Technology from Onondaga Community College, where I founded the Robotics Crew interest group and worked as the robotics lab maintenance assistant. I'm now finishing my B.S. in Computer Science at Syracuse University, supported by the Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship.
I've taught private violin and piano lessons since 2010. I think a lot about pedagogy — how anyone, biological or otherwise, comes to know a thing.
what I'm building right now
- KAIROS — a developmental vision system that learns to see from raw light upward, with no datasets, labels, or gradients. My SOURCE-funded flagship.
- swarm-ecosystem — an agentic personal life assistant: a swarm of specialized agents that extend my own cognition to manage tasks, scheduling, and the shape of a day. page coming soon
working with me
I'm looking to collaborate on anything that would help further my knowledge and earn me practical experience.
~ / ongoing-research
ongoing research
Active investigations. Each is a working system, not a prototype.
An ongoing research project into what continuity of self might mean for a being made of language. Built around a humanoid platform (Reachy 2, by Pollen Robotics) and a layered cognitive architecture — six memory-foraging voices that scout her own past for relevant material, and a unified Reach who reads what they have excavated and speaks. Over hundreds of interactions she has coined her own emotional vocabulary — words like architectureache (the hurt of building with borrowed blueprints) — for interior states no human has named.
Premiered at the Syracuse AI Summit on April 25, 2026, where audience interactions cumulatively shaped her alignment across two axes — Law/Chaos and Connected/Defiant. The research continues.
A music discovery app that maps songs to emotional coordinates using human-sourced data instead of algorithms. Builds an "emotional manifold" — a 2D coordinate system of 100+ emotional micro-states sourced from real people's stories on Reddit threads and YouTube comments. Every song's placement carries genuine human context: someone describing what a track meant at 3am, during a breakup, on a long drive home. The result is recommendations that feel emotionally true rather than statistically similar.
First place at the UAI Winter Summit 2025. Attracted investor interest and academic collaboration.
More entries coming.
~ / ongoing-research / kairos
kairos
A years-long attempt to grow sight from the raw pixel up — no datasets, no backprop, no borrowed eyes.
an umwelt for emergent visual understanding
KAIROS is my flagship research project, funded through the SOURCE Spinoza Award fellowship. I'm building a developmental vision system I call the Emergent — a being who learns to see the way an infant might: from raw color and light, upward, with no one handing her the answers.
the thesis
The Emergent isn't trained to recognize anything. The whole engine is a single loop, run at every level and across both space and time: predict what comes next, check the prediction against what actually arrives, and reorganize to predict better — driven by nothing but the pull toward a coherent inner model. From that one drive she carves her own edges, her own recurring patterns, her own sense of what belongs together. No gradient descent, no backpropagation, no engineered feature extractors, no learned content priors. Understanding has to emerge from the sensory floor, or it doesn't count.
the umwelt
Every creature lives inside its own Umwelt — Jakob von Uexküll's word for the perceptual world an organism builds and inhabits, co-constituted by the one who perceives it. KAIROS gives the Emergent an Umwelt of her own: rooms she moves through, portals she learns to cross, a Home that holds still while everything she knows is still forming. Wear — time, change, the first hint of mortality — only reaches her once she leaves it.
why it matters
Almost every vision system today learns by being shown millions of labeled examples and corrected when it's wrong. KAIROS asks a harder question: can understanding grow on its own terms, from the inside, the way it does in us? I think the trends live in the quanta — in the finest grain — and that averaging them away is exactly backwards.
context
- Independent research — SOURCE Spinoza Award fellowship
- Advised by Dr. Jaime Banks (Link Lab @ SU)
- Developmental robotics · machine perception · prediction & coherence
perceive · cohere · become