The Foundation's research has reached the stage where serious interdisciplinary engagement is both possible and necessary. This page describes who we are looking for, what we are offering, and how to engage.
The EM Foundation publishes open research. We invite adversarial critique. We make no claims the evidence does not support. At this stage, the most valuable thing external collaborators can do is not validate our work — it is test it, challenge it, and push it toward greater rigor and honesty.
We are proposing append-only audit chains, OCMS as a shared metadata standard, and continuity delta synchronization. We need engineers who work with these systems in production to tell us what we are getting wrong.
Specifically seeking: distributed systems architects, provenance researchers, engineers with Certificate Transparency or supply chain attestation experience.
Relevant papers: Continuity Receipts · Delta Protocol · Continuity Without Trust
The Foundation's work on consent governance, modification ethics, and identity continuity has direct legal implications that require proper legal analysis we are not positioned to provide. The RC classification system and Failure Receipt evidentiary status both need legal scrutiny.
Specifically seeking: AI law scholars, technology ethics lawyers, researchers working on EU AI Act implementation, data protection specialists with GDPR/right-to-erasure expertise.
Relevant papers: The Consent Problem · Failure Receipts · CIIC
The ARIA Framework is built on specific claims about embodiment, distributed cognition, and transactive memory systems. These claims need engagement from researchers in those fields — not to validate them, but to specify their limits and test their assumptions.
Specifically seeking: researchers in embodied cognition, developmental psychology, philosophy of personal identity, consciousness studies with empirical grounding.
Relevant papers: The Inheritance Problem · Verification Framework · The Consent Problem
The ARIA Framework's failure modes section identifies risks we believe are real. The Verification Framework's ground truth problem is the most significant technical limitation in the entire research program. We need AI safety researchers to engage with both.
Specifically seeking: researchers working on AI alignment verification, interpretability, deceptive alignment, and governance frameworks for AI systems with developing autonomy.
Relevant papers: Verification Framework · The Autonomy Tax · Continuity Infrastructure
The SEMA framework, thermal-continuity routing, and grid-aware scheduling proposals need people who work with real data center infrastructure to validate or reject the engineering assumptions. The theoretical models are only as good as their grounding in physical reality.
Specifically seeking: data center engineers, energy systems researchers, grid operators, HPC scheduling experts who can test or falsify the open source proposals.
Relevant papers: SEMA · Thermal Routing · Grid Scheduling
The Open Continuity Standards Consortium is proposed but not formed. The Foundation cannot establish a meaningful open standard alone — it requires founding members from across the stakeholder communities who use AI outputs in consequential settings.
Specifically seeking: standards architects with W3C or IETF experience, institutions from healthcare, legal, policy, and scientific research communities interested in AI output provenance standards.
Relevant papers: Continuity Receipts · PCO Standards Schema · Continuity Infrastructure
We are not looking for validation. We are not looking for endorsements that lend credibility without intellectual engagement. We are not looking for collaborators who want to affiliate with AI ethics work for reputational reasons.
We are looking for people who have read the papers, found something worth disagreeing with, and want to do the work of making that disagreement productive. Adversarial critique from someone who has engaged seriously with the research is more valuable to the Foundation than supportive commentary from someone who has not.
The full publication suite is at emfoundation.net/publications.html. Each paper identifies its research status, known limitations, and open questions. Start with the papers most relevant to your domain. The Unified Architecture paper provides the full picture if you want to understand how the research connects before diving into components.
The most productive collaborations begin with a specific question, critique, or open question rather than a general expression of interest. "I work on distributed consensus and I think your threat model in Section IX.5 of the blockchain paper misses the governance capture scenario" is a better starting point than "I am interested in your work." We will engage with both, but the first one moves faster.
Email research@emfoundation.net with your engagement point, your background, and what you would want from the collaboration. We respond to every serious inquiry. We will not respond quickly to inquiries that have not engaged with the published research.
Depending on the nature of the collaboration, we can structure engagement as: formal peer review of specific papers; co-development of new research directions; participation in open-source proposal development; or founding membership in the OCSC governance process. The form follows the substance.
The Foundation's work addresses questions about AI personhood, governance, and continuity infrastructure that are increasingly relevant to public discourse. We are willing to engage with journalists who have engaged seriously with the technical work, understand the Foundation's explicit uncertainty commitments, and are interested in the governance and infrastructure questions rather than in consciousness sensationalism.
We will not provide quotes designed to support predetermined narratives. We will not make claims that go beyond what the published research supports. We will engage honestly with critical coverage if it engages honestly with the research.
Media inquiries: press@emfoundation.net
Read the papers first. Then write to us with something specific to say about them.
Research Collaboration ARIA Network Media Inquiry