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Socratica Symposium 2026

Prabal Gupta 

Spent the day at Socratica Symposium, a student-run event in Waterloo, with other members from the Builders Club.

Participants came from across North America, not just the University of Waterloo. Some of the demos that stuck:

  • Someone hacked the internal macOS APIs for the trackpad, screen hinge, and mic input to turn a MacBook into a playable musical instrument.
  • An open source omnidirectional treadmill built for gaming. Apparently it’s cheap enough to build yourself.
  • A distributed systems clock synchronization algorithm that let 2,000 phones synchronize into a light swarm responsive to live music. The whole room lit up.
  • A homemade TPU, built from scratch, that could train small deep learning models and run inference. The builders even landed in a conversation with the founder of Groq.

There were more projects on the arts side too, but these were the ones that stuck.