We're gathering a small, interdisciplinary group of researchers, engineers, and practitioners to explore systems that operate outside the mainstream: vintage computers, weird machines, biological computing, and beyond. We'll approach the limits of computation at its smallest scale by revisiting the problems that upscaling sidesteps.
To attend, just email lrc-group@dartmouth.edu that you're interested!
To lead a project or give a talk/lightning talk, email the following to lrc-group@dartmouth.edu:
- Who you are
- A short note (a few paragraphs) outlining what you'd like to talk about or work on and its impact on the future of constrained computing, whether theoretical or applied
- Your availability during the conference (August 16-19)
Please send presentation and project applications by July 15, 2026. 
Acceptances will be sent out by July 20, 2026. The workshop is free; travel and lodging will be covered based on our budget, with priority given to presenters.
Instead of a formal paper submission, we are asking for brief, informal pitches for talks or discussion sessions. Please keep it conversational! We are looking for talks that will spark debate over coffee, not just lectures. We look forward to hearing what you're working on and hope you'll join us to help define the science of sufficiency!
To get ideas flowing, we've been thinking about the following areas. Please treat these as inspiration, not as limitations. If you are working on something cool in the low-resource space that doesn't fit these boxes, we want to hear about it!
- Strategic Sufficiency: Instead of asking how powerful we can make a system, how little does it actually need to succeed?
- Everyman's Exploitation: Can we find unintentional uses for hardware and software systems when they're not working as intended?
- External Effects: How do compute systems affect the world around us? How does it affect the humans who use it?
- Cutting Complexity: How can we make necessarily complex systems fully take advantage of the resources they're given?
- Overdue Overhauls: How can we upgrade legacy, rigid, or vendor-locked hardware?
We will be in touch shortly!
Previous project examples
- TI-84 WASM interpreter
- P2P LoRa
- Echo server from comtrend ADSL2+ router to TRS-80 thermal printer output
- 2bpp livestream mediated by ffmpeg on ppc32 linux over dialup
- Fixing old Gameboys (and breaking old Gameboys)