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Projects · 2026 · Personal project

Zero-Retention Context Engine

On-device macOS engine that understands the screen while provably retaining no pixels — MobileCLIP embeddings on the Apple Neural Engine, privacy adversarially verified.

On-Device AI Privacy Core ML macOS

Overview

A context engine that watches the screen via ScreenCaptureKit, reads it with on-device Vision OCR, embeds frames with MobileCLIP via Core ML, and keeps only L2-normalized vectors — the meaning without the pixels. The privacy claim is adversarially verified, not just asserted.

Problem

Screen-context assistants are a privacy nightmare: they either stream your screen to the cloud or silently retain screenshots. Can a system remember what you saw without keeping anything a human could look at?

Approach

Frames are embedded on the Apple Neural Engine and discarded in memory — measured at 3.0ms median per frame on M1 (329 img/s) and 2.0ms on M5, ~9.6–11.8× faster than CPU, with export correctness verified against the PyTorch reference (0.9965 cosine). Built entirely on Apple's on-device stack: ScreenCaptureKit, Vision, MobileCLIP, Core ML.

Impact

Rigorous on-device ML engineering: hardware-aware benchmarking, verified model export, and a falsifiable privacy claim — systems thinking applied to the most sensitive data there is.