# Ronen Tamari (@ronentk.me)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/ronentk.me
Headline: Co-founder, Cosmik Network

## About

I’m a researcher and entrepreneur working on collective intelligence systems to help us think better, together. I co-founded Cosmik where we’re working on new kinds of social networks for collective sensemaking, with a particular focus on science: how can we integrate social networks into the research lifecycle to improve curation, discovery and knowledge synthesis? We’re currently building Semble, a new social knowledge network for research on ATProto.

My PhD thesis focused on cognitive-inspired computational models of natural language understanding. I’m particularly interested in embodied and stigmergic cognition, and the role of learning environments in shaping human and machine intelligence.

I’m passionate about sociotechnical activism and building for impactful pro-social change! I’m a co-founder of the Sensemaking Scenius, a community focused on research, development, design and community-building around collective sensemaking. We’re working on technology and practices to help people and groups navigate information overload, find meaning and connection, and make sense of an increasingly complex world.

## Career

- **Co-Founder at Cosmik Network** (Jan 2025 - Present)
  Self-employed
- **Entrepreneur in Residence at Astera Institute** (Dec 2023 - Mar 2025)
  Developing Sensemaking Networks, a new kind of social network combining AI and semantic nanopublishing, to improve how we collectively curate, evaluate, disseminate and discuss scientific research.
- **PHD Candidate at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem** (Jul 2018 - Dec 2023)
  Jerusalem Area
  Hyadata Data Science Lab
  \- Dafna Shahaf Integrating grounded/embodied cognition research into natural language understanding systems.
- **Researcher at DAOstack** (Dec 2021 - Dec 2022)
  Research on platforms for decentralized collective intelligence & sense-making
- **Exchange Student at University of California San Diego** (Sep 2021 - Jun 2022)
  Visiting researcher at Prof. Judith Fan's Cognitive Tools computational cognitive science lab
- **Research Intern at Allen Institute for AI (AI2)** (Jun 2021 - Dec 2021)
  Seattle, Washington
- **Teaching Assistant at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem** (Oct 2019 - Oct 2021)
  TA for self-paced introduction to data science course at the Center for Interdisciplinary Data-Science Research (CIDR) in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
- **Summer Research Intern at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)** (Jun 2019 - Sep 2019)
- **Teaching Assistant at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem** (Oct 2017 - Sep 2019)
  Jerusalem Area
  TA for undergraduate computer engineering final projects workshop. Course management, assisting students in finding and framing research problems, project planning, presentation and evaluation.
- **Summer Research Intern at RIKEN** (Jul 2018 - Sep 2018)
  Research on natural language understanding and incorporation of external knowledge sources.
  
  Extraction of structured procedural instructions from scientific papers.
- **Blockchain Researcher at Orbs** (Jul 2017 - Apr 2018)
  Consensus algorithms research. Co-authored paper- Helix: A Scalable and Fair Consensus Algorithm Resistant to Ordering Manipulation
- **M.Sc at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem** (Jul 2015 - Jan 2018)
  Thesis: Hierarchical Tensor Decompositions
  \- Applications to Neural Network Design and Empirical Analysis  Works: Cohen, N., Tamari, R., & Shashua, A. (2017). Boosting Dilated Convolutional Networks with Mixed Tensor Decompositions, ICLR 2018

## Publications

- Research and Design for Sociotechnical Systems: What's Next for Infrastructure and Collaborative Ecologies? (Oct 2026) https://doi.org/10.1145/3785651.3816119
- Building Collective Intelligence Networks for Flourishing Scientific Communities (Dec 2025) https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.176538364.45030502/v1
- Quick notes from a meeting on research in the age of social networks and AI — ronentk.leaflet.pub (Oct 2025) https://ronentk.leaflet.pub/3m3s5gatn2s2h
- Sensemaking Networks: Transforming Social Media into a Sensemaking Layer for Science (May 2024) https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/wcsfa
- Open Access science needs Open Science Sensemaking (OSSm): open infrastructure for sharing scientific sensemaking data (May 2023) https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/9nb3u
- Breakpoint Transformers for Modeling and Tracking Intermediate Beliefs — EMNLP 2022 (Dec 2022) https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07950
- From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking — 33rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Barcelona, 2022 (Jun 2022) https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06345
- Dyna-bAbI: unlocking bAbI's potential with dynamic synthetic benchmarking — 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (Jun 2022) https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00086
- Scaling Creative Inspiration with Fine-Grained Functional Aspects of Ideas — CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Apr 2022) https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517434
- Process-Level Representation of Scientific Protocols with Interactive Annotation — European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) (Jan 2021) https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10244
- Process-Level Representation of Scientific Protocols with a Text-Based Game Annotation Interface — WordPlay Workshop @ NeurIPS2020 (Dec 2020) https://wordplay-workshop.github.io/modern/assets/pdfs/10.pdf
- Ecological Semantics: Programming Environments for Situated Language Understanding — Bridging AI and Cognitive Science Workshop, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020 (Apr 2020) https://baicsworkshop.github.io/program/baics_25.html
- Language (Re)modelling: Towards Embodied Language Understanding — Association of Computational Linguistics, 2020 (Apr 2020) https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.00311
- Playing by the Book: An Interactive Game Approach for Action Graph Extraction from Text — NAACL 2019 Workshop on extracting structured knowledge from scientific publications (ESSP) (Apr 2019) https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04319
- Helix: A Scalable and Fair Consensus Algorithm — IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), 2018 (Sep 2018) https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/863.pdf
- Boosting Dilated Convolutional Networks with Mixed Tensor Decompositions — International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2018 (May 2018) https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06846
- Tensorial Mixture Models — Pre-print (Oct 2016) https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.04167

## Skills

### Technical
- C
- C++
- Computer Vision
- Data Science
- HTML
- Java
- Linux
- Machine Learning
- Matlab
- Object Oriented Design
- OOP
- Programming
- Python
- Software Development
- Software Engineering
### Other
- Algorithms
- Computer Science
- Image Processing
- Neural Networks

## Education

- **The Hebrew University of Jerusalem** — Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (2018 - 2023)
  Hyadata Data Science Lab under Dafna Shahaf Fields of research: Integrating grounded/embodied cognition research (simulation, metaphor) into natural language understanding systems.
- **The Hebrew University** — Master’s Degree (2015 - 2017)
- **The Hebrew University** — Bachelor’s Degree (2011 - 2015)
  Hardware & Intelligent Systems track , including coursework in Image Processing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Verilog and FPGA design.

## Awards

- Core Data Science Research Fellowship (Oct 2021)
- Grad. School Dean's List (Feb 2017)
  For academic achievements, 2015-2016

## Involvement

### Volunteering
- Beliba Homa (בליבה חומה) (Oct 2013 - Jul 2017)
  Mentor
  Beliba Choma is a program aimed at assisting Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox stream of Judaism) Jews in academia. In general, this sector isn't well represented in universities and Haredi students usually suffer from lack of foundations in mathematics, English and other core curriculum subjects.
  
  For more than 2 years I've been helping a former Haredi student with little academic background with his computer science and mathematics related coursework.
  
  I'm gaining new perspectives through this program and learning a lot as well, about the power of determination in the face of adversity and how motivation can help compensate for lack of formal education.

## Languages

- English (native)
- Hebrew (native)

## Links

- ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6049-591X (verified)