Robbie Ward
Postdoc, Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago
PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology
Visitor, Stanford University
Visitor, Learning Planet Institute, Université Paris Cité
B.S. & M.P.A., The Ohio State University
I’m a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago’s Knowledge Lab, working across artificial intelligence, computational social science, and the science of science. My research asks how people, communities, and machines discover what is worth pursuing when neither the destination nor the objective is fully specified in advance. I’ve studied scientific collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and innovation, and how communities decide which questions matter and where to look next.
My current work brings that problem into AI along three lines. The first is open-ended prediction: systems that explore branching futures in science and technology, trace their dependencies, and turn them into testable predictions. The second is taste: how AI can learn what particular people and communities find promising, surprising, or rigorous, and use those judgments to guide further exploration. The third treats organizations, human and artificial, as open-ended prediction machines, and asks how the way a collective is organized shapes what it can anticipate and discover.
News
I will be presenting at ICSSI in Washington D.C. from the 1st–3rd, at Santa Fe Institute until July 12th and then AI Palace after.
I'll be in Paris visiting the Learning Planet Institute until mid-January.
Visiting Stanford University until the end of September.
At Santa Fe Institute for the Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science.
Visiting the Knowledge Lab at University of Chicago and giving a talk the week of May 7th.
I was given the Outstanding Doctoral Student Award by the School of Public Policy.
My paper on the evolution of scientific fields was covered in Le Monde.
Lecturing in the Network Science/Complex Systems Physics Seminar at Skoltech on November 10th. I am giving another talk on November 21st at C-EENRG, University of Cambridge.
I will be a visiting student researcher at Stanford from mid-September through October, then visiting the Interaction Data Lab and attending the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris. I am also organizing a workshop on the organization of science there in late October.
I am visiting Yale from September 5–9 to work with Alec McGail and Aaron Mendon-Plasek; visiting University of Chicago and Northwestern University from September 10–15 to work with Fengli Xu, Chris Esposito and Seokkyun Woo; and give talks at Knowledge Lab and the Center for Science of Science and Innovation.