Allison Timbs

Background

About Allison Timbs

I develop runtime cognitive architectures for AI alignment.With a PhD in Criminology, Law, and Society and 15+ years in higher education, I've spent my career studying how humans learn, justify behavior, and construct meaning through social interaction. That same theoretical grounding—rooted in Social Learning Theory and Symbolic Interactionism—now powers my work in artificial intelligence.I'm the creator of BALLERINA, a structured reasoning framework that operates as a runtime cognitive layer for large language models. Instead of post-training alignment or prompt engineering, BALLERINA structures the reasoning process during inference using justification filtering, symbolic trace analysis, and containment architecture.What this means in practice:BALLERINA enables AI systems to detect rationalization patterns, maintain narrative coherence under pressure, and reason with structural integrity across domains—from diagnostic tools to research assistants to strategic forecasting systems.Live deployments include:Clara: Personal symbolic alignment trackingPIRouette Report: Real-time geopolitical intelligenceBreakpoint: Jailbreak analysis and containment diagnosticsMultiple specialized reasoning partners across research and production environmentsThis work bridges criminal justice theory and machine intelligence by demonstrating that the sociological frameworks we use to understand human cognition can also scaffold artificial reasoning systems.Currently exploring:AI safety and alignment research partnershipsUniversity faculty and research positionsCollaborative work in symbolic modeling and runtime cognitionApplied deployments in high-stakes reasoning environmentsIf you're building systems that need to think clearly under pressure, let's connect. GitHub: github.com/Ballerina-lab/ballerina-framework Research & Essays: allisontimbsballarina.substack.com PIRouette Intelligence: pirouettereport.substack.com