What is Nerd Lab
Nerd Lab is an open, experimental playground for people who like to explore technology in unconventional ways.
It exists for three things: knowledge creation, awareness building, and showing colleagues what these tools actually do on a normal working day — AI agents, RAG, automation, data, web and app building.
It is not a company. It is not a course. It is not a corporate AI initiative. It is a group of true nerds in the making, and the entrance requirement is curiosity.
Why it exists
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Learn by building
Nothing here starts with a curriculum. We take a problem that is mildly infuriating, overengineer a solution to it, and work out what we learned on the way back out.
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Make new tech approachable for the curious
Most of this stops being intimidating the moment you watch someone else do it badly first. We do that part in public, on purpose.
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Open source everything
Every experiment, including the ones that did not work. Especially those — the failure is usually the interesting half.
Current experiments
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live
UN Data Commons Field Guide
A practical field guide and live query lab for the UN System Data Commons. It teaches you to ask well, because the search box will not tell you when you asked badly.
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live
AI at UNGA81
The week AI took the floor: 133 UN-linked events on AI around the 81st General Assembly, plus every General Debate statement that mentioned it.
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live
Country Classification Commons
How many countries are in Africa? 54, 60 or 48, depending on which official list you ask. Every UN, World Bank and OECD grouping in one auto-refreshing table, with a column that settles the argument.
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live
UNAIVERSE
An interactive galaxy-style explorer of the UN's journey with AI. Every link in it is official. The orbital mechanics are editorial.
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live
undata
UN data in Python, without the guessing.
pip install undata, type a country's name, get a table with UN names and a source on every row, then save it to Excel. Ask for Bengal and you get an error, never the United States. -
live
Four Years Left
Eleven years into the 2030 Agenda, with four to go. A scrollytelling briefing on AI and the SDGs for young Italian innovators visiting New York. It is a deck at the front of the room, an article afterwards, and a live quiz that keeps the room honest.
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live
The Future Is Not Artificial
AI feels like software. At scale it is also land, electricity, fibre, cooling and water. An interactive documentary for students in Alberta, where the website is the talk and it still runs with the Wi-Fi unplugged.
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live
The Ledger of Trust · আস্থার খতিয়ান
Thirty years of Bangladesh's bad-loan ratio, followed one number at a time. A Bangla-first data essay with a full English toggle, a family-share calculator, and a converter for what the missing money could have built.
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live
3I/ATLAS
A data-driven comedy special on the interstellar comet that is definitely not a spaceship. The comet is real. The alien hypothesis is satire. Please keep it out of your astronomy homework.
Join the lab
You do not need an AI background. You do not need a data background. You do not need a technical background at all.
If you are the kind of person who opens the settings menu just to see what is in there, you are already qualified. Everything we build is open source, and people who keep showing up become co-maintainers — not as a reward, just as an accurate description of what has already happened.