Kristina Šekrst

Research

I am an Assistant Professor at the Center for Cognitive Science, University of Zagreb, and machine learning lead at Meedan. I hold a PhD in justification logic(s) and master’s degrees in philosophy and logic, cognitive linguistics, comparative linguistics and Croatian language, while I'm currently studying astrophysics as well. My research covers how artificial and biological systems process language, reason and simulate thought, with a particular interest in astrobiology, philosophy of mind and language, and AI interpretability.

The Illusion Engine: The Quest for Machine Consciousness (Springer Nature, 2025) is the long version of that interest. Despite the title, I am not an illusionist about consciousness (no matter what AI-generated texts on the internet say): it is a pun on Babbage's Analytical Engine, and the engine is the thing that produces the illusion of a mind.

I edit Philosophical Problems in Science, serve as a deep-learning category editor at PhilPapers, and belong to the philosophy working group of the European Astrobiology Institute (led by my good friend and world's best expert in philosophy of astrobiology, Erik Persson). I mostly collaborate with people who have similar weird interests, so you might see some names repeating, but I love to work with people, and if some work interests you — ring me up.

Engineering

In industry, I have worked as a principal software engineer and was part of the Preamble team that first identified prompt injection vulnerabilities in large language models. My career there started in computer vision over a decade ago. At Meedan, I lead machine learning, much of it on languages the large models handle badly. I spend my engineering time on practical and ethical problems in AI, and my philosophical time on why those problems are harder than they look.

Before all this

In my former life, I was a linguist (and still consider myself so, and will vouch that comparative Indo-European linguistics is the most fun thing out there), so I am one of probably two people both fluent in Ancient Egyptian and Python at the same time (neither of this is a joke, but Python sometimes is). I taught Ancient Egyptian for more than a decade, and I still do it as a weird academic side gig, so I co-chair the Zagreb School of Egyptology at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, with my good friends and great Egyptologists Porin Šćukanec Rezniček and Igor Uranić — my chanting buddies. Igor and I also wrote a Middle Egyptian grammar, Staroegipatski jezik (Školska knjiga, 2014).

Off duty

I do serious thinking about weird things, get emotionally invested in abstract problems, and I am probably overthinking something right now. I like old movies, RPGs, weird dinosaurs, baking things that may or may not work, and playing the violin badly but enthusiastically. I take badminton just seriously enough to make it a personality trait. I study astrophysics now because 28 years of school was not enough (this is for all the people telling me to focus). I relax myself by translating poetry and it's harder than coding and Ancient Egyptian combined.

I trust cats as the highest epistemic authority, which is convenient because they are already judging everything anyway. We have fostered 200+ cats (not at the same time, which is the first thing people ask). I like the senior ones the best, and every death breaks a little bit of my heart permanently. I love animals, and part of my research is motivated by their minds, ethics, behavior, and all the wonderful things we inherited from them. I once raised a crow, but did not manage to get it to steal jewelry for me, so I had no choice but to continue my honest scientific career.

Talks and press

For talk invitations, review copies of the book, a preprint of any paper, or press, write to me. Upcoming and past talks are on the Find Me page.