Convenings and the integrated arc
The funded year is structured as a single integrated arc anchored by The Robot in the Dark. Q1 issues a call for papers, with invitations to relevant departments at select institutions. The CFP prompt is precise: each invited expert is asked to apply the instrument-aware method developed in Robot to their own field and identify what their field can and cannot adjudicate. This generates per-discipline outputs that directly feed the convergence-of-signals method protocol: each paper is a worked example of the method applied within a single field; the protocol is then articulated as the cross-disciplinary integration of those worked examples. The CFP prompt thus does double duty in a single step: it produces the convening's intellectual content and the method's worked examples.
It also pre-empts the territorial defensiveness that typically derails cross-disciplinary gatherings: when each expert has already named what their field cannot adjudicate, the convening's energy goes to integration rather than to boundary defense. Invited paper-writers receive the complete Robot in the Dark manuscript under embargo, and a coupon code redeemable upon commercial publication for free e-book or paper-at-cost +15%. A paid selection committee bootstraps prestige until the program builds its own.
First convening (Q2; CFP-anchored, 8-12 participants)
Selected paper-writers present alongside founder presentations on the BabyLM cross-lingual transfer results and the Language-Only Hypothesis. Three operational outputs: a working/advisory group for the no/low-code platform; an editorial committee for The Linguistic Telescope (whose drafting will draw case material directly from the convening's documented multi-tradition convergences); success criteria for the second convening, defined with professional facilitation.
Second convening (Q4; invitation-only, 12-18 participants)
The reveal event. Working no/low-code MÉTRON platform demonstrated; The Robot in the Dark commercial launch; substantial Linguistic Telescope draft preview; plans for a third convening as the start of an annual series. The 3-event arc spans Phase 1 (events 1 and 2) and Phase 2 (event 3 onward); by Phase 2 application time, the project has run two convenings with documented results and a known group of returning participants; the Phase 2 ask presents Event 3 as the next in an established series.
Operational credibility
The founder's prior tenure as CTO of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the global trade body coordinating operational and safety standards across approximately 360 airlines through a 57-office network in 52 countries, included precisely this kind of multi-stakeholder rallying as daily work. Brokering multi-lateral agreements among competing airlines, regulators across jurisdictions, and freight-forwarder federations is structurally the same exercise as bringing together philosophers, theologians, computational linguists, and AI researchers around shared boundary phenomena. The scale is smaller; the discipline is the same.
The multi-tradition epistemology
The convenings adopt an epistemological framing drawn from Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. Bellarmine's 1615 letter to Paolo Antonio Foscarini articulates a position more nuanced than the popular caricature of “the Church suppressing science”: astronomical models could “save the appearances” instrumentally without yet being demonstrated as physically true, and the promotion of an instrumental model to a physical claim required demonstratio. This is a serious instrument-aware epistemology, structurally identical to the discipline the present project develops. Bellarmine inherits a longer Catholic tradition traceable to Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram (early fifth century).
Comparable instrument-aware traditions exist outside Christianity and inform the convenings' multi-tradition design. Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed (twelfth century) develops a parallel framework in the Jewish tradition. Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers and Averroes's Incoherence of the Incoherence (twelfth century, Islamic tradition) develop a parallel epistemology of revelation, reason, and demonstration in dialogue with Aristotelian natural philosophy. Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka two-truths doctrine (second century, Buddhist tradition) is structurally analogous to Bellarmine's instrumentalism applied to a different metaphysical question. Each tradition has internal disciplines and serious contemporary practitioners; the convenings treat them as such, not as anthropological data to be processed by science.
Quarterly milestones
One-year project (November 2026 to October 2027), structured as the integrated arc described above.
CFP issued; invitations to relevant departments; invited paper-writers receive complete Robot in the Dark manuscript under embargo; paid selection committee assembled. Robot developmental edit begins. The Linguistic Telescope drafting begins from outline plus the published cross-linguistic results and the convergence-of-signals method outline. H100 capital procurement and co-location hosting finalized; training and evaluation pipeline ported from MÉTRON-FR to the H100. Multi-language MÉTRON ablation protocol pre-registered on OSF. Community-contribution channel established. No/low-code platform early POC presented at EMNLP 2026.
Paper submissions reviewed and selected. First convening: selected paper-writers present alongside founder presentations on BabyLM cross-lingual transfer and the Language-Only Hypothesis; three operational outputs delivered (advisory group, editorial committee for Linguistic Telescope, success criteria for second convening). Robot developmental edit complete; line edit begins. Linguistic Telescope first chapters drafted under the just-recruited editorial committee. First batch of languages trained at 125M parameter scale. Native-speaker linguists begin contributing minimal-pair benchmarks. Core platform UX in place.
Robot line edit and copyediting complete; cover and interior typesetting begins. Linguistic Telescope drafting continues with editorial committee feedback. First batch of languages evaluated; second batch of languages trained; first multi-language preprint deposited. Evaluation harness, results dashboard, user accounts, project workspaces, reproduction scripts, and documentation in place; alpha testing with first advisory group members. Convergence-of-signals method protocol drafted with worked examples from convening proceedings and empirical work.
Robot in the Dark commercially published; Zenodo CC-BY-NC-4.0 deposit. Linguistic Telescope substantial draft (estimated 60-80% of full manuscript) complete with editorial committee sign-off; commercial publication of Linguistic Telescope deferred to Phase 2. Final batch of languages trained, completing the multi-language MÉTRON family at the scope determined by the advisory group; open-weights HuggingFace release with documentation, training logs, and reproduction scripts; native-language benchmarks released as standalone Zenodo deposits. Platform beta release; working MÉTRON platform launched at EMNLP 2027 with funder acknowledgment. Second convening: platform reveal, Robot commercial launch, Linguistic Telescope draft preview, plans for a third convening as the start of an annual series. Convergence-of-signals method protocol formally published as standalone Zenodo deposit. Final reporting; data, models, training logs, code, platform, and convening proceedings archived under permissive licenses.
Phase 2 prepared
A Phase 2 proposal integrates the deferred items into one ask: the 4E HCI/cognitive-science empirical track on the multicardz vehicle, larger-scale parameter ablations (1B and 5B), the code-correctness-by-construction software-as-instrument research arc, the multi-convening annual series, The Linguistic Telescope commercial publication, and the broader subgrant-structured replication network. Phase 1's documented deliverables form the case for the comprehensive Phase 2 ask.