Thinking About Thinking.
An independent non-profit research and convening organisation, founded in 2020 and constituted as a 501(c)(3) public charity in the State of New Jersey.
Thinking About Thinking, Inc. is an independent non-profit organisation concerned with the interdisciplinary study of intelligence, broadly conceived and with the institutions through which that study is, or ought to be, conducted.
The empirical study of intelligence has, across the past decade, advanced substantially across artificial intelligence and machine learning; neuroscience and cognitive science; psychology, linguistics and the behavioural sciences; and the formal sciences that surround them. The institutional structures by which that progress is ordinarily integrated have not, on the whole, kept pace. The questions of greatest scientific consequence tend, in our experience, to sit between disciplines: they evolve faster than the societies organised to address them; they suffer disproportionately from inconsistent vocabulary and methodology; and they require new conceptual frameworks before they can be addressed with any seriousness. The work of this organisation is, in part, to attend to that asymmetry.
We pursue this through a small set of standing activities: peer-reviewed scientific conferences; a flagship summit on open problems in artificial intelligence; online seminar groups; an ambassador programme; a fellowship of researchers, engineers, and practitioners distributed across more than seventy cities; and a small number of public-facing media projects. The aim, in each case, is to convene the relevant participants in person where possible and in correspondence otherwise and to maintain sustained, methodologically serious exchange between them.
Our role, more modestly, is to construct the shared intellectual infrastructure that, in our view, allows serious work to proceed: spaces for careful inquiry; venues for rigorous exchange; and a standing community to which contributors may, year after year, return.
Interdisciplinary in substance. Not, on closer inspection, in presentation.
Dr Ruairidh McLennan Battleday
Cognitive scientist and AI researcher. Princeton PhD under Tom Griffiths, postdoc with Sam Gershman. Founder of Thinking About Thinking and convenor of NeuroMonster.
Professor James Whittington
Computational neuroscientist at Oxford. DPhil Oxford, Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship at Stanford. Work on hippocampal formation and structured representations published in Nature, Neuron, ICLR, NeurIPS.
Clare Maguire
Builds intellectual and cultural infrastructure for the next generation of scientific and technological communities.
Anastasia Ilina
PhD researcher in AI and Clinical Neuroscience at Imperial College London, working at the intersection of machine learning, wearable biosignals and Parkinson's disease research.
Georgina Cole
Designer, engineer and creative living in London; trained at Central Saint Martins, Queen Mary and the Royal College of Art.
Dr Yukti Chopra
Neuroscientist working at the intersection of cognition, wearable neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
Nick Cartwright
Former British Army officer with fifteen years across consulting, biotech and humanitarian leadership; coach-mentor in the not-for-profit sector.
Yousuf Ali
Content and social for Thinking About Thinking and NM26.
Curtis Webster-Machen
Freelance administrative and IT specialist; contracts and asset management across retail, finance and telecoms.
Open positions in support of our events, programmes, and communications are listed here as they become available. The most direct route into the work, in the absence of a current vacancy, is the Ambassador Programme; a number of our present staff first encountered the institution by that route.
Our session chairs convene the technical sessions of the Annual Conference and the AE Global Summit and serve, more broadly, as the standing programme committee of the institution. They are, in our experience, the part of the organisation that does the most work and is the least visible from the outside.
Correspondence is read personally. If you are unsure of the appropriate address, the general line below is, in practice, read first; the message is routed internally.
Thinking About Thinking, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered in the State of New Jersey.
28 Spring Street, Unit 156, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA