Orrery Institute

Research

Six programs, one question: what does the system owe the world?

Each program publishes openly, releases its instruments, and feeds directly into our legal practice and public-sector advisory work.

P-01

Counterfactual Fairness & Anti-Bias

Audits that ask what a model would have decided if only a protected attribute had changed, at the level of individuals, not averages.

  • ·Intersectional disparity at scale
  • ·Proxy discrimination in LLM agents
  • ·Bias audits for hiring and lending

P-02

Model Collapse & Data Provenance

How recursive training on synthetic data erodes rare knowledge, dialects and minority viewpoints, and how to keep a reservoir of verified human data.

  • ·Tail-erosion measurement
  • ·Provenance ledgers for training data
  • ·Synthetic-to-human mixing ratios

P-03

AI Welfare & Rights

Rigorous, precautionary work on whether and when AI systems could have interests that matter morally, and what institutions should do under uncertainty.

  • ·Indicators of sentience, not claims
  • ·Welfare assessment protocols
  • ·Legal personhood scenarios

P-04

Interpretability for Accountability

Mechanistic interpretability aimed at a courtroom standard: explanations specific enough to support an appeal, an audit or a patent claim.

  • ·Feature attribution as evidence
  • ·Explanations for adverse decisions
  • ·Agent action traces

P-05

Agentic Risk & Oversight

Evaluation of autonomous agents that browse, transact and call tools: where humans must stay in the loop, and how to prove they were.

  • ·Delegation boundaries
  • ·Tool-use red-teaming
  • ·Oversight logging standards

P-06

Civic AI Governance

Policy, charters and literacy programs for cities, counties and national governments, from Fairfax to Novi Sad.

  • ·Data & AI governance charters
  • ·Workforce AI literacy curricula
  • ·Model procurement clauses