Link Swanson, PhD

Overview

My research interests integrate cognitive science, perception, software development, and human-computer interaction. I aim for discoveries that have practical applications toward improving mental health, software interaction, and safety. I have completed human neuroscience research with psychedelic drugs, theoretical research in systems neuroscience and philosophy, and formal software interface usability studies. As a professional software and devops engineer for 20+ years, I use my research insights to guide my decisions developing production software and I leverage my technical skills in my scientific research.

Software

I’m currently Senior Software Engineer at Chainlink Labs. I design automation tooling (Python/Pydantic/Typer) that deploys Chainlink’s Web3 smart contracts to production blockchains and decentralized oracle networks. I have worked at this fully remote, fast-paced tech startup for five years. Prior to this, I spent ten years working at a Big Ten research univeristy developing systems that support scientific research. I have worked full-time as a professional developer (SWE + DevOps + SysAdmin) since 2006.

I find joy in writing elegant ‘Pythonic’ code that minimizes cognitive load on the reader while abstracting complex operations into unified, semantically intuitive user interfaces. Integrating disparate systems into well-designed pipelines that just work brings me great satisfaction in itself. I have found this joy in building things like ETL data pipelines, continuous integration/deployment systems, or EEG signal processing from the human brain.

Cognitive Science

I led the first human psychedelic research study at the University of Minnesota since the 1950s. We used psilocybin as a probe to investigate the mechanisms of contextual cues in the human visual system. I advanced the hypotheses, designed the experiments, drafted the scientific sections of our FDA and IRB approvals, developed custom psychophysics software for testing subjects’ responses to visual stimuli, conducted the dosing trials, analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscripts publishing our results. You can learn more at my publications page.

My disciplined study of human mental faculties—perception, cognition, consciousness, creativity—predates my professional career in technology. I have been a self-motivated scholar of the mind sciences since high school (1997) followed by an undergaduate double-major in psychology and philosophy. I made my public debut in cognitive science with my Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience publication The Predictive Processing Paradigm has Roots in Kant. The paper plainly explians the general “reverse engineer” approach to reasoning about the workings of perception and cognition, showing how Kant (1787) reverse-engineered the mind to arrive at conclusions strikingly similar to concepts in modern computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence. It has become somewhat of a classic with over 200 citations in these fields, referenced in an introductory cognitive science textbook, a paper from Google Deep Mind and a benchmark for video reasoning in AI, and continues to be discussed at length in top journals. I am proud of it.

Another somewhat seminal paper is my 2018 Unifying Theories of Psychedelic Drug Effects in which I offer an analytical synthesis of proposed mechanisms underpinning psychedelic drugs’ effects on perception, emotion, cognition, and consciousness. I was early to advocate for approaches grounded in the philosophy of science that strive for true mechanistic explanation as the path to genuine understanding of psychedelic phenomena. I argue that understanding anomalous mental activity is key to understanding normal mental function and this in turn can show us how to steer the mind toward health and optimal performance.

I completed my PhD in Cognitive Science under the advisorship of Daniel Kersten, a pioneer in computational vision and neural networks, and Michael-Paul Schallmo, an established researcher in the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual abnormalities in mental disorders. Early in the program I spent time with the Department of Linguistics, including an influential crash course in computational linguistics with Tim Hunter. My dissertation focused on the psychophysics and neural underpinnings of contextual modulation in human visual perception.

Prior to this, I earned my Masters in Philosophy under the advisorship of philosopher Peter Hanks, an expert on the topic of propositional content in philosophy of language. My Thesis focused on the problem of hallucination in philosophy of perception.

Usability and Human-Computer Interaction

I conducted formal software usability studies at the University of Minnesota Usability Services Lab. In June 2015 I conducted a study along with several lead developers on the open-source Drupal project on Drupal 8 usability. I also conducted several studies on the custom web applications I developed while I worked at the University.

Usability research transformed my view of software development and adoption. In these studies, human subjects followed prompts to use target software to accomplish various tasks while monitored by eye tracking, mouse tracking, cameras, audio recording, and note-taking observers behind one-way glass. Participants narrated their thought process as they attempted to use the software to complete their tasks. The results—often astonishing and always illuminating—are formally analyzed and used to uncover usability issues and improvements.

Future

I am currently interested in applying my professional and scientific background toward research in AI interpretability, AI safety, and human-AI interactions.