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A new lab, still deciding what it is.

Dissensus started this year and is still taking shape. There are two researchers and an affiliate, twenty papers, six open problems, and a company incorporated this July — which means very little here is settled. Someone joining now is not filling a slot in something already built; they get a say in what the lab works on, how it decides a result is finished, and what it becomes over the next few years.

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01 · Roles

Three rungs, each entered by doing the previous one

What that looks like in practice: research roles, entered by doing research. The ladder below is short on purpose — it starts at a task you could finish in a weekend and ends at a standing affiliation and a title you can put on a CV, and each rung is reached by doing the previous one rather than by applying. There is no funding yet, so none of it is paid, and the limits are set out plainly further down rather than buried. Everything else — which problems matter, which methods the lab trusts, what it refuses to do — is genuinely open, and more so now than it will be later.

I

Contributor

Open
One named task. Five to twenty hours, once.

You take one specified gap from the open projects and close it. Blind-code a table, run one inference pass, rate a sample for severity, sweep a literature claim. The task is defined before you start and finished when the output exists; there is no ongoing obligation in either direction.

What you get
  • Named acknowledgement in the paper, or co-authorship where the contribution is substantive by the standard on this page
  • A dated written record of what you did, which is the thing that is actually useful when someone later asks
  • The output stays yours to talk about, publish alongside, or cite

How to enterPick a task below and say which one. No CV needed.

II

Research Collaborator

Open · 6 projects
One project, carried to a result. Weeks to months.

You own a gap on a named project through to a publishable result rather than to a deliverable. That means the study gets designed, run, written up and defended, and if it fails it gets reported as a failure under the same inference standards a positive result would get.

What you get
  • Co-authorship, with author order agreed in writing before the work starts rather than after the results are in
  • Listed by name on the project record here, with what you own stated plainly
  • Standing to describe the work as done in collaboration with Dissensus
  • First refusal on the paid version of the role if the project gets funded

How to enterName the project and the gap you would take. Say what you would bring and what you want out of it.

III

Research Affiliate

By agreement
Ongoing, cross-project, by mutual agreement. No hour quota.

The standing version of the above: you work across the programme rather than on one paper, you are consulted on design before things are built, and you are listed as part of the lab. It is not a job and it is not paid. It is entered after you have delivered something, because a title handed out before any work has happened is worth nothing to the holder.

What you get
  • The title Research Affiliate, Dissensus — usable on a CV, ORCID record, LinkedIn profile, or a paper's affiliation line
  • A signed confirmation letter on company letterhead stating the role and its dates, which is the artefact institutions and visa processes actually ask for
  • A dissensus.ai email alias, and listing on the About page
  • Standing co-authorship eligibility across the programme, and first refusal on paid roles when there is money
  • An affiliation for grant and fellowship applications where you need a host that is not a university

How to enterNot applied for. It follows from work already done together.

02 · Start here

Tasks, listed at the size they actually are

Every task below is a real gap in a real project, described in the project's own words on the Projects page. The hour figures are the estimates written into those project notes, not sales copy. People say yes to a weekend and no to an open-ended collaboration, so the tasks are listed at the size they actually are — and the fastest way to end up shaping the lab is to close one of them and then disagree with us about what comes next.

03 · The limits

What the lab cannot offer

Up front, because finding it out later wastes more of your time than reading it now. Some of these are constraints that change with funding; the rest are choices, and they are marked.

04 · Organisations

Applied work and partnership

Commercial engagements are the one place money changes hands, and they are deliberately separate from everything above: a client owns the deliverable, whereas funding the programme produces public goods. For friction analysis, systemic-risk indices, formal verification in Lean 4, or adversarial evaluation of multi-agent systems, email research@dissensus.ai with the problem as you currently understand it, or book fifteen minutes. If we are not the right lab, we will say so.

Book 15 min 020 3807 1624
05 · Get in touch

Propose something

Say which task or which project, what you would bring, and what you want out of it. Concrete beats enthusiastic. A first reply usually takes weeks rather than days — the lab is one researcher and a research assistant, both with papers of their own in flight — and a reminder after a month is a courtesy rather than a nuisance.