JOPRO is accepting proposals for research positions and other opportunities running for the 2026-2027 academic year. All positions are remote, run twelve to fourteen weeks, and carry the option to continue on the project afterward. They are open to graduate students, postgraduate and early career researchers, and undergraduates prepared to work at that level.
A change for this cycle is in how applications work: select projects now have a proposal requirement.
As an institutional note: we do not use AI in our evaluation process.
New opportunities and calls for Fall 2026
Four research positions are live across our working groups and the forthcoming Center for Futures Studies.
Between them they cover:
whether claims about agency and cognition still hold once they are moved off the systems they were built on (substrate agnostic agency studies);
the history of how psychiatry, psychology, and clinical mental health came to define what they study, and what was closed off over their establishment;
multiple projects on machine behavior and AI Agents, including how to tell whether a language model reasons morally or only produces output that reads that way;
and how the current system of scientific publishing came about, from the commercialization of journals through the rise of citation metrics to the consolidation of the industry into a few large firms.
Additional postings and collaborations will be made public throughout the month.
Those opportunities include a developing interest group on accessibility and assistive technology, as well as forthcoming role within a project on emergent behavior and boundary/convention transgressions by AI agents as spearheaded by Data x Direction research intern Alicia Ouyang.
News around the JOPRO Community
The JOPRO Futures Center
The JOPRO Center for Futures Studies launches this fall as a living lab for use-inspired research in futures studies, philosophy, metascience, and strategy and systemic change.
Its pre-launch site is live at futures.jopro.org, covering the Center’s approach, its active work on FrontierMap and the Field Guide to the Futures Ecosystem, and the four initiatives building its first full operating year: foundational papers and theory of change work, an essay contest on overlooked on-ramps to desirable futures, a micro-residency cohort of two or three people, and a 2026 conference.
The call for partners and advisors is open now, as is the cohort interest list.
From our network and alumni
Karina Zambani, a research intern with Data x Direction and the Society, Ethics & Technology group, now serves on the University of California AI Steering Committee, which works alongside the UC AI Council on responsible AI across the ten-campus system. She is an undergraduate at UC San Diego studying data science and philosophy, and one of two students on a committee otherwise composed of chancellors, deans, system CIOs, and national laboratory directors.
Zambani also addressed the 2026 Data x Direction Summer Cohort on early career strategy and other aspects of technology, education, and vocation earlier this year.
Also from Data x Direction, Tlamelo Makati is finishing her PhD work on accessibility at Technological University Dublin. She published “Active inclusion in the real world” this month. The argument, in paraphrase: AI ethics guidelines converge on fairness, accountability, and transparency while leaving those principles weakly actionable, and the alternative is to build inclusion into the AI lifecycle itself, across data governance, problem framing, evaluation criteria, deployment constraints, and monitoring after release.
Makati works through Hagendorff’s review of the guidelines, Selbst and colleagues’ argument that fairness cannot be added to a model once it has been built, and the documentation practices established by datasheets for datasets and model cards.
Open strands on Human-AI relationships
Several questions about human-AI relationships have been accumulating across JOPRO’s community of inquiry in recent months: what it means to view a LLM text as honest, when honesty may not be a property such a system can have; how a clinician would assess or diagnose someone whose steadiest daily relationship is with a language model; what happens to th…
Earlier this year, we aggregated numerous strands of discussion concerning Human-AI relations. Cutting across multiple working groups, programs, and organizations, we look forward to continue many of these discussions in the opportunities listed above.
More updates from the 2026 Data x Direction Summer Cohort will be released in a forthcoming email.
Fall Programming Preview
Several discussion series will be continuing, including the Modernizing Mental Health and DigiNEST (Digital Narratives and Emerging Story Technologies) events.
New this fall:
DigiNEST Studio & Workshop Days. In addition to the public-facing discussions series, a new set of sessions has emerged where digital creators, software and app makers, creatives, and other technology-makers meet to discuss their projects. This builds upon JOPRO’s existing incubation efforts and is in response to our growing community of practice.
Lecture-Lab Combined Program. In partnership with Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory, we are extending the Cognition Futures Reading Group & Cybernetics Interest Group into a paired sequence of weekly discussion sessions followed by lab/implementation sessions.
Shop Talk: Directing Research Programs, a new series for those directing, designing, and developing organizations and research programs. Building upon past efforts such as Jes Parent’s “Management and Leadership: On Navigation for Research + Innovation”, Bradly Alicea’s coursework on Open Source Project management, and “JOPRO & the New Learning Ecosystem”, the series will explore key elements of cultivating spaces to do innovative, multi-disciplinary investigations.
If you are interested in exploring these opportunities, please reach out. Don’t see it? Pitch a role: if you have an idea for how you could collaborate or contribute to JOPRO’s mission, we want to hear it. Send a brief description of the role you’d create and what you’d bring to it to Start [at] JOPRO dot org.
Fall 2026 Incubation Open Period has closed
JOPRO is no longer accepting Fall 2026 incubation proposals.
Thank you to all who have engaged us with interest this year! We are processing materials and will announce accepted projects throughout the fall term.
Celebrating an unprecedented summer!
Thanks to all who have made the summer unlike any other in JOPRO’s history! In our broader community, we had programming six days a week across the Joint Open Source Summer Cohort, Data x Direction, Google Summer of Code (Orthogonal Research and Education Lab & DevoWorm), DigiNEST, Cognition Futures, and more.
We will be hosting in-person events in the Boston/Cambridge area, New York, and potentially California later this year as well. To participate in our public events, follow the JOPRO Luma Calendar.
For more information and updates about programming and future opportunities, please subscribe to our updates below.