Ryan SangBaek Kim, Ph.D.

Founder & Director, Ryan Research Institute

Affective Neuroscience · Cognitive Science & Philosophy · AI Ethics

Ryan Research Institute

Institute for Affective Sovereignty and Interdisciplinary Studies

The Ryan Research Institute (RRI) is an officially registered independent research institute in Paris, dedicated to advancing the emerging field of Affective Sovereignty Studies.

Our work integrates affective neuroscience, philosophy of mind, psychology, and AI ethics, while building bridges into law, business studies, and the arts.

We explore the deep structures of emotion, cognition, freedom, and human identity, with a mission to develop new frameworks for the ethical design of human-centered technologies and societies.

At the core of our mission lies a conviction:

To understand the architecture of feeling is to redraw the map of what it means to be human

This website serves as the official archive of our peer-reviewed publications, books, musical works, and essays — and as an evolving hub for interdisciplinary research, international collaboration, and ethical policy dialogue.

🔎 Latest Research Highlight

Featured Event — International Presentation

Affective Sovereignty presented at Sapienza Università di Roma (2 February 2026)

Event: Ethics for AI: Challenges, Opportunities, and Human-Centered Perspectives

Session: Accountability and Care

Organizer: SIpEIA (Italian Society for Ethics in AI)

Location: Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy

Date: 2 February 2026

On 2 February 2026, Ryan SangBaek Kim presented the framework of Affective Sovereignty at Sapienza Università di Roma, addressing a growing ethical risk in emotion AI: the quiet displacement of interpretive authority from the person to the system when emotional labels become records.

The talk argued that the central risk of emotion AI is not misclassification, but interpretive displacement—a structural shift in who holds the final authority over the meaning of one’s emotional experience.

Core claims:

• Privacy protects data; Affective Sovereignty protects meaning.
• Emotion AI must be designed so that interpretation remains contestable by default.
• Systems should operate under three auditable principles: interpretive restraint, interpretive provenance, and user authority.

“The deeper risk is not that the machine gets emotions wrong — but that its answer becomes the only answer.”

Verification & related work:

• Peer-reviewed foundation: DefMoN — Machine Learning with Applications (Elsevier, 2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mlwa.2025.100817
• Extended essay: The Night I Defended the Right to Feelhttps://profryankim.substack.com

→ [Read the full event summary →]

NADI / ANEST — Four-Paper Program

Status: Under Review

The full NADI–ANEST program — Dataset → Human Baseline → Mechanistic Theory → Geometry / State-Space Modeling —

has been fully completed and submitted across four top-tier venues:

• Scientific Data (Dataset Paper)
• Nature Human Behaviour (Human Baseline)
• Psychological Review (ANEST Framework)
• Nature Machine Intelligence (Geometry / Modeling)

Together, these papers establish the first integrated ecosystem for narrative–affect discrepancy, emotional regulation theory, and mechanistic modeling.

Dataset DOI →

Program DOIs Overview →

News & Highlights

Research Programs

RRI now develops five flagship research lines, each representing a core dimension of affective sovereignty and human–AI cognition:

• NADI–ANEST Program — Narrative–Affect Discrepancy & Emotional Self-Regulation

Four-paper ecosystem: Dataset → Human Baseline → ANEST Mechanistic Theory → Geometry / State-Space Modeling.

• Defensive Motivational Nodes (DefMoN) — Language × Defense × Affect

Formal model for inferring defense mechanisms and affective motivations from linguistic structure.

• Resonant Amplification Framework (RAF) — Human–AI Amplification & Circuit Breakers
• Predictive Emotional Selfhood in Artificial Minds (PESAM) — Computational Selfhood & Affective Priors
• Algorithmic Affective Blunting (AAB) — Collapse Curve of Interpretative Failure

Includes the Affective Degradation Index (ADI) and junk-persona causal testing.

Explore All Research Programs →

Research Collaboration & Fellowship Programs

RRI operates small, invitation-based research collaboration and fellowship programs designed to support advanced scholarly work beyond standard publication cycles.

These programs focus on reproducibility, validation, documentation, and methodological refinement, and are structured around asynchronous, document-driven collaboration rather than coursework or mentoring.

Participation is limited to a small number of researchers per cohort, with clearly defined scopes, deliverables, and governance frameworks.

→ View current research fellowship programs

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A multidisciplinary hub for research, ethics, and the arts in the age of AI