Research

I lead research at Metagov. Before that, I completed my doctorate (and postdoc) in computer science at Oxford, and held fellowships at Stanford (at the Digital Civil Society Lab), Princeton (in the CS department), and MIT (in the math department). My work explores the intersection between artificial and collective intelligence. In particular, I am interested in how to apply higher math, especially category theory and sheaf theory, to the design of complex intelligent systems ranging from AI to human organizations. I also conduct more applied research on the governance of online communities.

For an updated list of publications and preprints, please see my CV. My work has been funded by the NSF, Ford Foundation, Omidyar, Sloan, EPSRC, EU Next Generation Internet, Henry Luce Foundation, One Project, NIST, Ethereum Foundation, Optimism Foundation, and others.

Currently:

• I co-founded Metagov.
• I lead DAOstar.
• I advocate for public AI.
• I do research on subsymbolic organizations.
• I started a “bank” for DAOs at a hackathon. It won.
• I am currently resident at UCLA, as part of the Mathematics of Intelligence program at IPAM.
• I am an associate fellow at Chatham House, where I often collaborate with Alex Krasodomski.
• I run a research project and RFP to support interoperable deliberative tools with Aviv Ovadya, Colin Megill, Amy Zhang, and Eugene Leventhal.
• I wrote an essay called “DAOs by example“, soon to appear as a book chapter, courtesy of Florence Guillaume.
• I lead To Community, a project funded by the NSF, Ford, Sloan, Omidyar, and Open Collective to build calculators that model governance transitions in open source and E2C.
• I’m working on a paper surveying the analogies between artificial and collective intelligence with Divya Siddarth and Jacy Reese Anthis.
• I’m working on a paper exploring “isomorphic” structures inspired by causal theory in the context of style transfer and cross-domain learning (based on an older project with Wistan Chou and Sokwoo Rhee on theoretical guarantees for cycle consistency).
• I edit a book series with Bob Coecke called Applied Category Theory, published by Cambridge University Press. The first book in the series is Theoretical Computer Science for the Working Category Theorist by Noson Yanofsky. Email us if you have an idea.
• I’d like to build an integration between Airtable (where I track my projects) and WordPress so that I can update this page automatically. Along with a few other workplace automations. If this is something you can help me do, I’ll pay you!

Previously:

• I helped organize a few events in 2024, including a math for governance workshop at Edinburgh (part of the Mathematics for Humanity series), DAO NYC (part of SBC ’24), AI Palace 2024, AI as Public Infrastructure at the Library of Congress, and the DAO Asia Summit in Bangkok.
• I wrote a workshop paper on public AI (and poster) for RegML at NeurIPS 2023, with Nick Vincent, Sarah Schwettmann, and David Bau.
• I wrote a large DAO survey paper called Open Problems in DAOs with many co-authors, but especially my co-editors Tara Merk, Sarah Hubbard, and Eliza Oak. We released it with an attached site, DAO Science, in order to catalyze more impactful work on DAOs.
• I organized an (un)conference called AI Palace in July of 2023.
• I wrote a manifesto on autonomous art with Primavera De Filippi.
• I taught a course in spring ’23 at Carnegie Mellon called Governing Many Worlds with Michael Zargham.
• Geoff Mulgan, Divya Siddarth, Saffron Huang, Tom Malone, Lewis Hammond, and I developed a proposal around an IPCC for AI—see versions at MIT Sloan, Carnegie Council, Noema. Original draft here.
• I helped found and was formerly on the executive board of Compositionality, a new peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal dedicated to compositional ideas in science and mathematics, especially those with a categorical origin.
• I organized a conference called DAO Harvard in April 2023 with Sarah Hubbard, Connor Spelliscy, Primavera De Filippi, and Tara Merk.
• I wrote a memo called “How code is used” for trade negotiators working in AI, commissioned by Public Citizen.
• For 2021-2022, I was at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab as a Practitioner Fellow.
• I built Govbase, a set of research data sets for online governance, with support from Michael Zargham, Ellie Rennie, Riley Wong, Lucia Korpas, and many others.
• I wrote a paper called “Political, economic, and governance attitudes of blockchain users” with Lucia Korpas and Seth Frey, based on the Cryptopolitical Typology Quiz that I launched in 2021-2022. It was published in Frontiers in Blockchain.
• I contributed to a paper called “All Intelligence is Collective Intelligence” with J Benjamin Falandays, Roope Oskari Kaaronen, Cody Moser, Wiktor Rorot, Vishwanath Varma, Tevin Williams, and Mason Youngblood. It was published in the Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience.
• I wrote a paper called “Building net-native agreement systems” with Luke Miller. It was published at the MIT Computational Law Report.
• I wrote a paper called “Towards a participatory digital ethnography of blockchain governance” with Ellie Rennie, Michael Zargham, Luke Miller, Jonathan Abbott, Kelsie Nabben, and Primavera De Filippi. It was published at Qualitative Inquiry.
• I wrote a paper called “Composing games into complex institutions” with Seth Frey, Jules Hedges, and Philipp Zahn. It was published in PLOS ONE.
• I worked with Aleksandar Petrov and Miriam Ashton on a type system for digital institutions, and presented a poster at ACT 2021.
• In one terrible/wonderful week of 2021, I participated in both the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute and the Alan Turing Institute’s Mathematics of Machine Learning Summer School. Oy 😪
• I co-organized a session at Mozfest 2021 called “Civil Society Reimagined” with Amelie-Sophie Vavrovsky and Marlena Wisniak.
• I wrote a paper called “Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities” with Nathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, and Amy Zhang. I presented it at CSCW 2021.
• I published an article on Medium called “Exploring DAOs as a New Kind of Institution” with Michael Zargham, Primavera De Filippi, and Jeff Emmett.
• I organized a workshop called “The building blocks of Web 3.0” with Primavera De Filippi and Juan Ortiz Freuler. We also organized a follow-up workshop at RadicalXChange 2020 called “The Declaration(s) of Cyberspace“.
• I helped teach a course at Harvard called Governing Virtual Worlds, with Lawrence Lessig and Elettra Bietti.
• I worked with Jeff Ding on AI markets and AI governance. Preliminary discussion paper here.
• For the academic year 2018-2019, I was based at Princeton as the Fleet Visiting Fellow from Magdalen College.
• I worked with economists and game developers on the in-game economy of Seed.
• Eliana Lorch and I wrote a blog post for the n-Cafe, on the behavioral approach to systems theory.
• In 2018, I organized Applied Category Theory 2018 with Brendan Fong, Bob Coecke, John Baez, Aleks Kissinger, and Martha Lewis. As part of the workshop’s activities, I participated in the ACT School 2018 in Pawel Sobocinski‘s group, where we discussed how to use cartesian bicategories to formalize ideas in Jan Willems’ behavioral approach to dynamical systems.
• I worked with Sokwoo Rhee and other members of NIST on indicator frameworks for smart cities.
• As part of an NSF fellowship program, I worked with David Spivak and his lab at MIT on applied category theory, specifically on categorical approaches to data integration and to complex systems modeling. I also worked with Spivak and Andrea Censi on category theory for co-design problems (slides from my talk at UPenn), a broad class of optimization problems.
• I co-founded a “living lab” with the City of Boston and three MIT startups called the Local Sense Lab. We won the GCTC Leadership Award in 2016, plus a $10,000 novelty check.
• I was the entrepreneurial lead for Categorical Informatics, a math+data company spun out of MIT.
• During my M.S., I worked with Misha Gromov on the mathematical foundations of AI. I wrote my master’s thesis on (highly speculative) connections between cohomology and learning, which I’m trying to develop in my doctoral thesis.
• Before math, I worked in robotics at ScazLab, where I helped program robots in several human-robot-interaction experiments.
• Before robots, I studied art history at Yale (technically, I majored in EP&E and humanities), where I wrote my senior thesis on the sublime.

I am currently collecting my thoughts and questions into a summary of my research (the first version was my master’s thesis); any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! The paper is modeled on this paper by Andreas Holmstrom.