Growing the Topos tech team
1 Integrating research and tech
Mathematics and science achieve their greatest impact when innovative basic research is coupled with translation into robust and usable technology. That is easier said than done. Today, research and development, despite appearing conjoined in the acronym “R&D,” are rarely done together. Research in mathematics and other foundational fields happens almost exclusively in academia, whereas production-grade technology is built mostly by industry. Moreover, the flow of ideas tends to be unidirectional, from “theory” to “practice,” failing to create the feedback loops that would supply basic researchers with unexpected ideas and worthwhile problems.
So far, much of our work at Topos Institute has been basic research in mathematics and computer science, pioneering a mathematical systems science and and demonstrating it through software prototypes. That important work will continue. However, for our research to produce its intended effects—enabling collective inquiry across science and engineering, and helping people of all stripes navigate a complex and rapidly changing world—we must integrate our research with practices and workflows that people have, without requiring that they possess specialized training in advanced mathematics. Technology is a key means to embody mathematical ideas in this way.
At Topos Institute, we are working toward practicing an integrative process of creating new mathematics and building usable technologies, with feedback flowing regularly in both directions. We aim to vertically integrate basic research in systems theory with the development of usable technology for collective inquiry, all in service of public benefit. We believe that our unique structure and culture—drawing funding from a mix of research grants, industrial contracts, and philanthropy; equally respecting the crafts of research and development; pursuing team science though high-bandwidth, in-person collaboration; and taking a careful, reflective attitude toward the creation of technology—will make it possible for us to do so.
2 CatColab
Our first foray into user-facing technology is CatColab, a collaborative environment for formal, interoperable, conceptual modeling.
Now at an early alpha stage, CatColab supports modeling, qualitative and quantitative, across a range of domain-specific languages. Its key components include a library for its core logic, written in Rust; a backend server, also written in Rust; and a web frontend supporting real-time collaborative editing, written in TypeScript. At the same time, CatColab is based on, and is being developed continuously with, new mathematical approaches to categorical logic and categorical systems theory. Thus, CatColab is at once a tool intended to be used by modelers in science, engineering, and beyond, and a means to ground and validate new mathematics being created at the Institute.
While we’re proud of what we’ve built so far, we have a long way yet to go. Much of our vision for CatColab is only implicit in the tool as it exists today. A few directions that I’m particularly excited about are:
- Compositional models: The only reliable way to build or understand a complex model is to decompose it into a smaller pieces. CatColab will support importing existing models and fusing them together into a new model, a fully declarative approach to modularly constructing complex models.
- Data instances: It will be possible to create not just data schemas but also instances of tabular data over a schema. Schema and instance will be editable live and in parallel, offering much of the fluidity of a spreadsheet but with the guardrails and type safety of a database system.
- Specs and verification: In engineering, systems are designed to meet external specifications or requirements. CatColab will support defining specifications and aid in verifying that a proposed design satisfies the specs.
Ultimately, we aim to make a CatColab a next-generation tool for collective inquiry that seamlessly integrates models, data, analysis, learning, specification, and verification.
3 Growing the team
To realize this ambitious vision, we need to grow our team of technologists. I’m excited to announce two new positions on the Topos tech team:
- Software Engineer (US): call for applications
- Software Engineer (UK): call for applications to appear
These will be the first full-time software engineers that we hire at Topos, complementing the research scientists and research software engineers currently on our technical staff. As such, this is an unique opportunity to shape the design and implementation of CatColab at a critical juncture in the project, and to both learn from, and advance toward practice, the mathematical research that CatColab is based on.
If you have any questions about the positions or the process, please don’t hesitate to reach out at the email addresses linked in the calls for applications. Thank you for your interest in Topos Institute!