Red Team Kitchen is a one-person research-and-software lab. The hardware lives in Chicago (call sign Ascended Base) — a single RTX 5090 desktop and an M4 Max MacBook sitting next to it. A research node lives in Bloomington–Normal next to ISU. Everything you see on this site — the brain scans, the four narration voices, the local-first agent, the public demo URL — is built and shipped by one operator out of those two locations.
The human running the lab. Designs the architecture, writes the code, files the LLC paperwork, and answers the email. Background in trading and software systems; current obsession is local-first AI on consumer hardware — the thesis that an RTX 5090 in Illinois can do real research-grade neuroscience demos for ~$3 a month in electricity.
Reach: soumitlahiri@philanthropytraders.com · GitHub: @AlexiosBluffMara
An Illinois LLC formed in 2025 as the legal home for Soumit's research and
software output. Holds the GitHub org (AlexiosBluffMara),
the redteamkitchen.com domain, and the Cloudflare / Google
Workspace / Tailscale accounts the lab runs on. "Red Team Kitchen" is
the public-facing brand; "Alexios Bluff Mara" is the formal legal name
on filings, contracts, and copyright lines.
Single-member LLC · State of Illinois · 2025 formation · Bizee filing
Illinois State University is a public research university in Normal, Illinois,
founded in 1857 — the oldest public university in Illinois.
Cardinal red #CC0000 is the brand color; Reggie Redbird is the
mascot; the visual language of every page on this site respectfully echoes
ISU's published brand guidelines (without using ISU's protected wordmarks
or seals). Our active research collaboration sits in the
College of Applied Science & Technology; see the
named collaborators below.
illinoisstate.edu · Normal, IL · College of Applied Science & Technology
The lab — call sign Ascended Base — is in
Chicago, Illinois. Both production GPUs live here:
Seratonin (the Windows desktop with the RTX 5090) and
Big Apple (the M4 Max MacBook Pro). When you hit the live
Cortex demo URL your request travels through a Tailscale Funnel into
Chicago, lands on Seratonin, and the Mac is sitting next to it as
overflow. The lab also operates a node in Bloomington–Normal —
Mini Apple — that lives near ISU for in-person research
meetings. Baby Pi (a Raspberry Pi 5 edge node) is in
progress, not deployed yet.
Chicago, IL (HQ) · Bloomington–Normal, IL (research node) · Cook + McLean Counties
The faculty we work directly with at the College of Applied Science & Technology. This is a research collaboration only — we don't do coursework with ISU.
ISU faculty in Information Technology / Cybersecurity. Research interests sit squarely on the seam this lab cares about: applied AI/ML systems, secure local-first deployments, and reproducible research workflows on consumer hardware. The exact person to think with about whether an RTX-5090-in-Chicago can actually substitute for a hospital-affiliated research compute cluster — and what the security model looks like when it can't.
ISU faculty whose research bridges human-computer interaction, applied machine learning, and the kind of multimodal-perception work that maps directly onto the Cortex pipeline. The person to bring in when the question is "what happens when a real undergraduate cohort touches a brain-response demo for the first time, and what does that teach us about the model's failure modes?"
ISU faculty in computational and mathematical biology — neuronal-network modeling, dynamical systems, and quantitative biology. We've had one introductory meeting so far; this is an early-stage relationship, not a formed collaboration. Listed honestly here because her research adjacency to TRIBE-style brain-foundation-model work is exactly the kind of conversation the lab wants to keep open.
seratonin is the gaming desktop in Normal. scylla-betta.ts.net is Soumit's personal Tailnet.@abmsnowy (ABM = Alexios Bluff Mara). It's the same single agent everywhere.