Conference in Cambridge, Mass May 12th

Dear friends of the POP-UP School

I am super excited to invite you to a conference I am hosting this May in Cambridge Mass. Click on the link below to learn more and to register:

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The conference will be participatory, kicking off with roundtable discussions on seed questions and moving into open panel discussions.

Check Out Our Speakers

Janet M. Cooper Nelson

(Ret.) Chaplain of the University / Director of Religious Life, Brown University

Fierce advocate for compassion, coordination, and creativity. Chaplain of Brown U. for 35 years and the first woman University Chaplain in the Ivy League. Clinical Faculty at The Warren Alpert Medical School and on the Board of Hope Hospice and Palliative Care of RI and the Leadership Council of Harvard Divinity School.

Forrest Landry

Systems engineer, entrepreneur, master woodworker, and metaphysician

Former systems architect for the FBI, TSC, IDW, DARPA, and the Library of Congress. Author of The Immanent Metaphysics and Effective Choice. Designer of Ephemeral Group Process, a governance methodology to increase communities’ capacity to discover and integrate their values into policy.

Michael Levin

Principal Investigator, Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University

Discovering previously unknown kinds of biological intelligences and disrupting canonical theories of genetic control in morphogenesis. Designing new collective organisms, without any evolutionary history, to explore the space of cognitive capacities across biological, machine, and hybrid systems.

… and our panelists

Tom Murray

Special Advisor, Association for Spiritual Integrity

Adult developmental theorist and creator of StageLens, automated scoring of ego development psychometrics. Author of “Wisdom, Complexity, and Transcendence: A Developmental Frame” in The Oxford Handbook of Adult Development and Wisdom.

Zachary Miller

Data scientist and AI research lab founder

Data scientist and AI research lab founder. Coauthor of “Brilliant Machines: A Pragmatic Approach to Responsible AI.” Now building a startup focused on radically brain-inspired AI.

Cameron Berg

Research Director, AE Studio

Empirical AI consciousness researcher. Coauthor of “Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing.” Now launching an independent research nonprofit.

Michael Anton Dila

Director Policy Futures Lab, Americans for Responsible Innovation

Founder, innovation lead, and historian of science. Former Advisor at Helpful Places; Former Director, National Security Innovation Network (U.S. DoD)

Addy Cha

Founder, ekkolápto

Inventing new methods for modifying physiology and cognition by reinterpreting Pavlovian conditioning, psychosomatic conditions, hypnosis, and placebo/nocebo through the lens of modern cognitive science and information theory.

Thomas Kehler

Founder & Chief Scientist, Crowdsmart

Former CEO of IntelliCorp, the first AI/Expert Systems company to go public, and Advisory Board member of the National Research Council. Now Chief Scientist, Co-Founder and Board Member at Crowdsmart, a collective intelligence company.

B Cavello

Director of Emerging Technologies, Aspen Digital

Facilitating the tech and policy community for the public good. Steward of the Public AI Network, Assistant program chair for NeurIPS, 2026 Siegel Research Fellow, and Board member to Metagov.

Ronen Tamari

Founder, Cosmik Network

Building collective intelligence. Building social network tools for collective scientific sensemaking and stewarding the ATProto Science community. Inaugural Astera Fellow. Renaissance Philanthropy BiTS Fellow.

Avijit Ghosh

Technical AI Policy Researcher, Hugging Face

Building bridges between AI safety research and regulation. Host of the EvalEval Coalition and co-author of “Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems” in The Oxford Handbook of the Foundations and Regulation of Generative AI.

Heather Alexander

Cofounder, Future of Citizenship

Advocating for human rights and innovating in legal paradigms to handle citizenship, identity, and personhood law in the age of AI, transhumanism, and biocompute. Author of The Nationality and Statelessness of Nomadic Peoples.

Alex Forrester

Co-Founder & Chief Impact Officer, Rising Tide Capital

Guiding entrepreneurial education and philanthropic strategy toward economic and ecological justice. Board Chair of The Schumacher Center for a New Economics and Public Theologian in Residence at First Presbyterian Church of Hudson. Rising Tide was recognized as a CNN Hero and by President Obama.