Our Summer Research Associates in 2022
The Topos Institute is pleased to introduce the 2022 cohort of Summer Research Associates! Each of them brings a unique and meaningful perspective to the Topos team, and we consider ourselves lucky to have the opportunity to engage in this important learning and teaching experience. Education is a core value at Topos, both because we regard collaboration and diversity in life experiences as contributing factors to the success of any well-rounded organization, and because we would like to make a positive impact in the lives of young students and early-career researchers. I’ve asked each of these incredibly bright and ambitious associates to describe a bit about their work and general plans for the summer, and what they’re bringing to the Topos table!
The Topos Institute is pleased to introduce our 2022 cohort of Summer Research Associates: Angeline Aguinaldo, Anthony Agwu, Alejandra Arciniegas, Harrison Grodin, Michael Lambert, and Joshua Meyers. Each of them brings a unique and meaningful perspective to the Topos team, and we consider ourselves lucky to have the opportunity to engage in this important learning and teaching experience. Education is a core value at Topos (see Item 2 of our Strategic Plan), both because we regard collaboration and diversity in life experiences as contributing factors to the success of any well-rounded organization, and because we would like to make a positive impact in the lives of young students and early-career researchers. As part of this impact, we’re especially excited, lucky, and grateful to have our esteemed Senior Advisor Dana Scott mentor Anthony and Harrison this summer!
I’ve asked each of these incredibly bright and ambitious associates to describe a bit about their work and general plans for the summer, and what they’re bringing to the Topos table!
Angeline Aguinaldo is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park advised by William Regli. She is fascinated by problems that require choosing good abstractions to model engineered systems. She is currently focused on traceability and change propagation between models of an environment to task plans in autonomous systems. This summer, she will be working with Evan Patterson and Sophie Libkind to implement category theory-based AI planners in the AlgebraicJulia ecosystem.
Anthony Agwu is a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University working under Emily Riehl. His research interests are in Homotopy Type Theory and Realizability. Previous research before coming to the Topos Institute was in trying to find realizability models of Homotopy Type Theory. Currently at the Topos Institute, he is investigating reflexive objects in monoidal closed categories and cartesian closed monoids and their relationship to linear logic and realizability.
Alejandra Arciniegas is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University where she works in ethics and technology, with a focus on the evolving moral status of “guessing” versus “observing” in the context of AI-powered predictive algorithms. At Topos she is working to explore and articulate policy guidelines governing the ethical development of foundational theory in relation to its downstream applications in mathematics and technology.
Harrison Grodin is an incoming computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, where he recently completed his undergraduate degree in CS focusing on type theory and programming language theory with Bob Harper. He’s passionate about using elegant mathematical ideas to find far-reaching patterns in computer science. This summer, he is working with Dana Scott at Topos to understand categorical semantics of typed and untyped programming languages using topology and domain theory.
Michael Lambert is an associate lecturer at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and recently finished a postdoc at Mount Allison University. He works mostly in double categories and their applications. This summer he’ll be working with Evan Patterson on two projects. The first is one on using double categories to improve the expressive capabilities of OLOGs. The second is a project meant to develop a general paradigm for category of elements constructions that will better explain certain examples like decorated cospans.
Joshua Meyers is a PhD candidate in Math at Indiana University. His central concern is to find a way to do math which also serves the public good. He works on categorical databases at Conexus AI, where he has recently coauthored a paper on the chase algorithm. He also is organizing Scholarship Workshop 2023, a student-led meeting to envision institutions and cultures of scholarship beyond the university. While at Topos, he intends to draw a deeper connection between the first two of Topos’s goals, “creating a new mathematical systems science” and “deploying this science through building publicly-oriented tools”. One way this could happen is by utilizing this new systems science to describe algorithms, computation, and computing machines, since these are the basic concepts and materialities underlying the tools which Topos is building.
