Tim van Gelder, Austhink Software founder and chief ‘Austhinker’, is a cognitive scientist, consultant and software entrepreneur specializing in improving human thinking.
Academic Background
Educated at the University of Melbourne (BA, 1984) and University of Pittsburgh (PhD, 1989), Tim held academic positions at Indiana University and the Australian National University before returning to Melbourne as an Australian Research Council QEII Research Fellow. In his PhD research he studied artificial intelligence and knowledge representation, looking particularly at how information is encoded in the human brain. Turning his attention from representation to processes, he became an early philosophical proponent of the dynamical approach to cognition, according to which human thinking is best understood using concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory and chaos theory.
Research in his third phase shifted to the problem of how to improve thinking, particularly reasoning and critical thinking skills. He set up The Reason Project at the University of Melbourne, which developed a software-supported method for improving critical thinking. Extensive empirical studies showed that this method reliably produces substantial gains in generic skills.
Tim is recognized as a pioneer in argument visualization and critical thinking training. He has over 60 publications in cognitive science, and was winner of the 2001 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Critical Thinking. He has presented his work in dozens of international conferences and major universities.
Austhink
In 2000 Tim co-founded Austhink Consulting, with a mission to help improve thinking in organizations by bridging the gap between what is known in academia and what is needed in the workplace. Austhink Consulting is now Australia’s leading niche consulting firm in areas such as critical thinking training and structured argumentation. Its clients include major organizations in the US intelligence community, which have adopted Austhink techniques in their analytical training. Tim was centrally involved in the development of Austhink Consulting’s distinctive offerings.
In 2004, Tim founded Austhink Software to develop high-quality, mass-market software to improve argument in both education and the workplace. Austhink Software secured investment from angel investors and venture capital fund Starfish Ventures, and in 2006 released Rationale™, the only commercial grade argument mapping tool in the market. In March 2008, Austhink released bCisive™, in which the underlying technology of Rationale was oriented toward general business decision making. bCisive supports ‘Business Decision Mapping’, a simple methodology for making significant deliberative decisions.