ARIA Safeguarded AI Programme, new faces, and a splattering of ink lab notes

Hello and welcome! The lab is positively buzzing with energy this month. First, lab director Peter van Hardenberg will announce a major new initiative — this one has been a long time coming. Next, you’ll hear about two researchers who have recently joined our staff. Finally, we’ve got a collection of lab notes about Programmable Ink, to scratch your hardcore engineering itch. So without further ado, here’s Peter!

Ink & Switch supporting the ARIA Safeguarded AI Programme

I’m pleased to share that Ink & Switch has joined the ARIA Safeguarded AI Programme. It’s an ambitious research programme dedicated to making it possible to employ AI systems in large-scale safety critical applications, such as optimizing national power grid allocation or developing biomedical supply chains. The programme is funded by the UK Government’s Advanced Research + Innovation Agency.

This might seem far afield from our usual area of work, primarily focused on “tools for thought”, but in fact that’s precisely what we’re offering to the programme. We’ll be working with our fellow Creators in the programme to develop the interfaces that help people and AI agents collaborate on building accurate models of interesting real-world systems.

While it’s still early days for our collaboration, and we don’t want to presume what the best approach for this project will be, our work on Patchwork is what brought us into the programme, and is a starting point for further exploration.

The SGAI programme is significant, including too many teams to name across many disciplines, but we are joined in our little sub-group by our friends at HASH (who some of you might recognize from the Block Protocol), the Future of Programming lab building Hazel under Cyrus Omar’s direction at the University of Michigan, and the Topos Institute who are working on CatColab.

A sneak peek at CatColab running inside Patchwork.

Throughout the next two-and-a-half years, we’ll be spending lots of time in the UK working closely with the research group and with the many people and institutions who might need these tools. We held our first UK-based meetup recently at the tldraw offices (thanks to Lu and Steve for hosting us), which featured demos of Patchwork, Hazel, Tonk, DXOS, and Cursor for Canvas.

I’m excited and honored to be a part of an ambitious project like this, and I’m grateful to David Dalrymple and the ARIA team for bringing us on board. We are just one small part of a huge team, but we are delighted at the chance to continue to develop tools for thought in a new context of serious use.

As always, if your organization could use our help, you can always reach out. We’re available both informally and in partnership.

Oh, one more thing: one of the requirements of the programme is the open-sourcing of all code participating in the project, so we’ll be releasing Patchwork in some form soon. It needs a little more time to bake in the oven before we turn you loose on it but… watch this space.

Two new faces joining the lab

We’re pleased to welcome a pair of new researchers to our team. They’re joining, in part, to lend a hand with our work on the ARIA Safeguarded AI Programme, each bringing a particular area of expertise.

You may remember John Mumm (he/him) from his work on Keyhive. After a brief stint away, he’s rejoined the lab to help implement a version of Keyhive suitable for Patchwork, and will also be contributing to Automerge. John also has a knack for cooking up surprising little local-first demos, so don’t be surprised if some of those make an appearance in future Dispatches.

We also have chee rabbits (they/them or just chee), who joined just weeks ago and has already rebuilt the core of Patchwork in a much more modular form. While Patchwork started as a research prototype, we’re now using it for much of our collaboration within the lab, and it’ll be up to chee to steadily increase its dependability and malleability.

Exploring ink deformation

Several of our projects — Keyhive and Patchwork, for instance — have “notebooks” chronicling their evolution. For Programmable Ink, however, we’re doing something different.

The ink work is fluid, and has been advancing in surges over the life of the lab. In that time we’ve amassed a sizable collection of lab notes internally, but they aren’t organized in any sort of coherent sequence or structure. Lately, we’ve been collecting some of these existing notes, and writing new ones, to grow a wiki (of a sort) tying these notes together.

It’s not meant to be the sort of thing you sit down and read front-to-back, or follow along with as each new entry is added (though if you’d like to, subscribe to our RSS feed). Rather, we’ll occasionally point you to something new—a good starting point—and let you explore from there. Follow your curiosity.

The search for handmade drawings imbued with computational power continues!

This month, we’re sharing an exposition of ink deformation. In short, it’s our goal to imbue the ink and paper of your digital notebook with a sense of material physics, behaviour informed by but diverging from their real world analogs. This includes systemic behaviours like undo/redo—naturally—but also more specialized behaviour. In the case of ink, we’re looking for ways to make it bend, stretch, and mold. For instance, if you draw an arrow, you should be able to grab the arrow and point it at something else — yet it should still look like it was drawn by your hand.

To that end, here is Ink Deformation — A Review, and if you’d like to explore deeper, see this growing collection of all our ink deformation notes.

What’s another open tab?

That’s all for this month. As ever, we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. Simply reply to this email, or use one of the many other ways to connect with us. See you next time!

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