Research lab investigating friction dynamics in multi-agent coordination.
Dissensus is a research-focused company investigating what happens before strategic interaction—before the game starts, before payoffs are assigned, before anyone agrees to play.
Game theory assumes cooperation or competition. We study the structural conditions under which either becomes possible. The friction that makes delegation costly. The consent mechanics that make governance legitimate. The entropy that makes optimization lossy.
The work is interdisciplinary by necessity—drawing from mechanism design, political philosophy, computational finance, and AI alignment. The common thread: any system with multiple optimizing agents produces measurable friction, and understanding that friction is prerequisite to reducing it.
The research programme is interdisciplinary by design rather than default.
Finance treats risk as information about future states. Philosophy treats consent as information about legitimate states. AI alignment treats preferences as information about valued states. We are developing methodologies to formalise and measure all three.
Mathematical models with empirical commitments. The Axiom of Consent, the Replicator-Optimization Mechanism, legitimacy quantification. Theory that can be tested.
Market microstructure studies, agent-based simulations, event studies. Frameworks that cannot survive empirical contact are revised or discarded.
Private compute cluster. Reproducible workflows. Non-proprietary code and methodologies published under CC-BY-4.0. Reproducibility is not optional.
Director responsible for operations, strategy, and commercial direction. Chair of the Management Oversight Committee. Provides strategic oversight for the Adversarial Systems research programme, ensuring the lab's theoretical ambitions translate into sustainable institutional infrastructure. Dissensus exists as a research vehicle for adversarial systems theory—Davud's role is making that vehicle roadworthy.
"We are more beholden to custom than reason; it is thus reason’s task to interrogate custom."
Recent MSc Finance Analytics graduate (King’s College London) and BSc Accounting & Finance (SOAS, First Class). Research interests span computational finance, political philosophy, and AI alignment, unified under the Adversarial Systems & Complexity Research Initiative (ASCRI)—the formal study of friction dynamics in multi-agent coordination.
Currently seeking a PhD placement and research fellowship to develop these frameworks further. Author of 24 working papers across Zenodo, SSRN, and arXiv, with manuscripts under peer review at Springer journals. Principal developer of the Axiom of Consent and Replicator-Optimization Mechanism frameworks around which Dissensus is organised.
Responsible for distributed systems, GPU compute infrastructure, and simulation pipelines. Co-author on the ASRI framework (Aggregated Systemic Risk Index) for measuring DeFi-TradFi interconnection risk.
Independent researchers and colleagues with whom we maintain ongoing intellectual exchange. No formal employment or contractual relationship.
Cross-disciplinary collaborator contributing methodological perspectives across the research programme.
Dissensus AI is a UK-based research initiative with an active publication programme across computational finance, AI alignment, and political economy. Currently publishing through arXiv, SSRN, and Zenodo, with multiple manuscripts under peer review at Springer journals and Nature portfolio.
Active ResearchFormal frameworks for friction dynamics, empirical methodologies for cross-domain validation, and the infrastructure to run it all independently.
PhD supervision, research fellowships, and collaborators interested in stress-testing formal frameworks against empirical evidence.
Enquiries may be directed to research@dissensus.ai or via the collaboration proposal form.
Follow the research programme through our publications and mailing list. Substantive enquiries welcome via email or the collaboration proposal form.