I’m an independent AI builder and researcher in Wisconsin. I don’t work for a university or a lab. Most of what I’ve done has just come from being curious about AI companions, building things, testing ideas, and trying to document what I’m finding as I go.

One of the problems I got interested in was memory. If an AI companion remembers something wrong about a person and they correct it, does that correction actually stick? Does it get used later, or does the system keep falling back to the old information?

I ended up writing a short paper about that called Tracing Corrections Through AI Companion Memory: A Practical Evaluation Protocol and Exploratory Case Study.

It got accepted to SIAI 2026, the International Conference on the Social Impact of AI, which is happening November 13–14 in Boston.

The part I’m stuck on now is the registration fee.

They require at least one author to register by October 25 or the paper gets dropped from the proceedings. The author registration is $150. I asked if they could waive it because of my financial situation, but they declined.

I’m currently homeless, so $150 is not something I can just pull together right now.

This fund has a $500 minimum, so I want to be upfront about that instead of trying to make it sound like the conference itself costs $500.

The first $150 would go directly to the SIAI registration so the paper stays in the conference.

Any access would go toward replacing the computer I’m using for this work. I’m still doing basically everything on a 2017 MacBook Air. Coding, testing AI systems, writing, research, running my website, all of it. It still works, but I’ve definitely pushed it pretty far.

I’m not asking for money to travel to Boston. If I can’t make the trip, I can present virtually.

I also try to keep my work public. I’ve built open-source tools around AI memory evaluation and companion portability, and I post research work here:

https://troymaya.com/research/

If this gets funded, I’ll post the registration receipt, and once the paper is published I’ll share that too. I’ll also be transparent about what happens with the rest of the money.

I’m basically just trying to keep something I already worked hard enough to get accepted from getting stopped at the last step because I can’t afford the registration.