Recent dispatches.

On the academic side, I am looking forward to joining the 9th World Conference on Research Integrity in Vancouver, Canada. I will be presenting two posters and a talk on applications of my K-theory — the framework that treats scientific knowledge as a problem in information compression and has already demonstrated its power in predicting reproducibility outcomes.

A genuinely exciting deployment of comCensus: I was invited to present at the LSE Information & Democracy initiative, where all participants were then invited to use the platform to work out a consensus position on interventions to tackle misinformation.

The response was remarkable — nearly 50 participants contributed almost 200 posts. Organiser Jens Madsen will be assisted by the comCensus technology to synthesise these contributions into a published report, demonstrating exactly the kind of structured, AI-assisted collective intelligence the platform was built for.

The new design is meant to do justice to the full range of work — research, comCensus, photography, music, and historical dance.

On the research front: Science has just published my book review of Bazerman's Inside an Academic Scandal; and our first empirical support of K-theory was published this summer in RSOS. More results will follow soon.

comCensus is going strong. The method has been completely revised, so questions can now be open to any respondent, with an AI that helps participants be understood, breaking language and cultural barriers. This new approach will be deployed within the TRUSTparency project, of which Science of Science Ltd is a proud member.

I'm on my way to WCRI to give a keynote in the opening session and present results of two studies — including the first direct, pre-registered evidence that K-theory works: it predicted the irreproducibility of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative data.

I will then be off to Kenya to engage young psychologists with how complexity affects their field, at this year's SIPS conference.

The Theoretical and Empirical METaknowledge (TEMET) lab was officially born two months ago, with the onboarding of its first researcher, Dr Ifan Jams, and the registering of the lab's URL temet.science.

comCensus has developed beautifully — see the new landing page. Can you see the brain in the logo?

Proud and excited to see the nascent comCensus.org startup featured in this excellent Nature article.

Belated new-year resolution: resume curating and updating this site. Some items:

• Joined Heriot-Watt University as Assistant Professor, where I'll teach research methods and finally establish a lab. Postdoc positions to follow.
• Began testing comCensus.org — the evolution of the covidConsensus project. The plan is to learn more about engaging participants, smoothen the edges, and build a team.
• On the K-theory front (now preferably "Information Compression Theory", ICT), I will pre-register a crucial test: predicting results of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.
• Still on ICT: preparing a talk for The Science of Consciousness Conference next week. I'll propose an original theory of consciousness based on ICT — Metaknowledge Theory. The metaknowledge explanation seems to me to dissolve many apparent mysteries about consciousness, including the (non-)existence of qualia and the so-called Hard Problem.