We’re pleased to welcome James Evans as Preseen’s Chief Scientist.
James is the Max Palevsky Professor of Sociology and Data Science at the University of Chicago and founding director of Knowledge Lab and the Chicago Center for Computational Social Science. His papers have been widely published in Nature, Science, PNAS, and top computer and social science outlets.
His connection to Preseen goes back to its origins. James helped inspire our co-founder and CEO, Venia Veselovsky, to pursue forecasting important world events in the wild. Over the past year, he has helped shape our research agenda and will now lead that work.
James studies how people (and machines) generate, share, and evaluate knowledge about the world, and how AI can help us anticipate discoveries and identify promising ideas that researchers might otherwise overlook. He leads a University of Chicago research project awarded $20 million by the National Science Foundation to anticipate scientific and technological advances. His recent work includes PreScience, a dataset and benchmark for testing scientific forecasting in AI research, several works showing how AI can unintentionally narrow future science, and how to counterbalance these tendencies for more impactful discoveries and forecasts.
These questions are central to the research we want to pursue at Preseen: how to make better forecasts, broaden the factors they consider, evaluate them at scale, and help AI systems incorporate forecast results to drive critical decisions.
A sneak peek at what we’ll be working on:
A common layer for knowledge sharing across AI agents.
Evaluations for forecasting scientific and technological progress.
Predicting key human decision-makers’ decisions
Categorizing and counteracting informational bubbles.
Improving human decision-making through complex forecasts
If you’re interested in working with James and the Preseen team on forecasting research, reach out to careers@preseen.com.