The programme and the person behind it

Leadership Under Uncertainty is a research programme on the judgments that AI systems make about what matters, what is credible and what warrants inquiry or action. It brings together a philosophical account of judgment, a shared representation, an architecture for discovering strategic insights, evaluation instruments, an organizational theory, operating reference feeds and a set of implemented applications, and it tests whether making those judgments explicit improves them.

The programme is led by Christopher Berzins, Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, where the research is conducted. He is the author of the launch paper and of the six companion manuscripts, and the designer of the reference software that implements them.

The programme is run without venture funding. Its next stage, the decisive test described in the launch paper, the human study with a participating board, and independent replication of the initial findings, is open to collaborating researchers, practitioner communities and institutional partners.

Four rules

• Every claim is labelled by the level at which it exists: specified in a manuscript, implemented in reference software, operating on live data, or measured in a study.
• Study protocols are sealed before data collection, and results are published whatever the outcome. Negative results are reported with the same prominence as positive ones.
• Judgments are recorded with a hash when they are written, and the record is anchored where a third party can confirm that a judgment preceded its outcome and has not been altered since.
• The programme’s own evaluators are measured against outcomes, and an evaluator whose reliability falls below threshold no longer settles a verdict alone.

Write to the programme

For collaboration, data contributions, rater participation, funding discussions, or comments on the papers, write to Christopher Berzins at cberzins@uottawa.ca.

Christopher Berzins
Visiting Professor
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa