Research notebook — Issue 001 · Updated 05 Aug 2026
Volunos Labs
An applied research lab. We take technical questions that are not yet answerable and turn them into evidence.
Est. 2026BelfastApplied R&DSIC 62012 / 72190
Current lines of enquiry
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How far can a simulation be coarsened before its decisions stop matching the fine model?
Open Opened 06.2026
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What does a defensible experiment record for an R&D tax claim actually need to contain?
In progress Opened 06.2026
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Can edge-side signal filtering remove enough noise to make a cheap sensor behave like an expensive one?
Open Opened 07.2026
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Where is the line between a problem that is merely hard and a problem no amount of engineering will rescue?
Written up Opened 06.2026
Entries
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How much of a physical process can be replaced by a learned surrogate before the error compounds?
Engineering teams increasingly want a fast approximation of a slow solver — a surrogate that answers in milliseconds what a reference model answers in hours. The interesting question is not whether a surrogate can be fitted; it usually can. It is where the surrogate's error stops being a rounding difference and starts changing the decision the model is being used to make.
We are building a small harness that sweeps coarsening levels against a reference solver and reports the point at which decision agreement breaks down, rather than reporting mean error alone.
- Method
- Reduced-order modelling; error-bound sweeps against a reference solver; decision-agreement scoring rather than mean error.
- State
- In progress — internal line of enquiry, no publication yet.
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Can filtering at the sensor make cheap hardware behave like expensive hardware?
A great deal of instrument cost buys noise performance rather than capability. Where the noise is structured — thermal drift, mains interference, quantisation, mechanical resonance — some of that gap is recoverable in software, on the device, within a very small compute and power budget.
The honest answer is bounded: filtering cannot recover information the sensor never captured. The work is establishing where the boundary sits for a given class of measurement, so a hardware decision can be made on evidence rather than on a vendor's claim.
- Method
- Characterisation of noise structure; fixed-point filter design; benchmarking against a reference instrument under matched conditions.
- State
- Open — bench work under way on a constrained microcontroller target.
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Where does a problem stop being hard and start being intractable?
A recurring pattern in commercial software is a requirement that is quietly impossible at the scale it is written for — a scheduling constraint, an exact-match problem, a combinatorial search that looks tame in a demo and explodes in production. Discovering this after eighteen months of engineering is expensive.
This line of enquiry is about producing a short, readable feasibility argument early: what the cost curve looks like, which relaxations recover tractability, and what the organisation would have to give up to get them.
- Method
- Complexity framing; empirical scaling curves on representative instances; documented relaxations and their cost in accuracy or coverage.
- State
- Written up internally — being turned into a repeatable assessment format.
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What shape should engineering data take before anyone knows what will be asked of it?
Test rigs, production lines and field equipment generate data long before there is a question to ask of it. The modelling decisions made at capture time — units, provenance, sample identity, what counts as one observation — determine whether that data can answer anything at all five years later.
We are interested in the minimum discipline that keeps an engineering dataset answerable without imposing a schema nobody will maintain.
- Method
- Provenance modelling; unit and uncertainty carrying; retrospective answerability tests against archived datasets.
- State
- Open — internal, drawing on public engineering datasets only.
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How much inference can move to the device before latency stops being the binding constraint?
Moving computation to the edge is usually justified on latency. In practice the binding constraint often turns out to be something else — thermal budget, memory bandwidth, model update logistics, or the cost of getting evidence back off the device when something goes wrong.
The enquiry is about measuring which constraint actually binds for a given deployment, so the architecture argument can be settled with numbers.
- Method
- Latency and thermal profiling on target silicon; quantisation sweeps; measurement of update and observability overheads.
- State
- Open — early instrumentation stage.
Working with organisations
We are usually brought in before the requirement is written. If you already know what is to be built and need it built, an ordinary software studio is the right supplier. Volunos exists for the stage before that: when the question is whether a thing is possible, at what cost, and with what error.
Feasibility study
You have a technical question with no reliable answer inside the organisation. We frame it precisely, establish what would count as evidence either way, run the smallest experiment that settles it, and write up what we found — including the case where the answer is no.
Typically 3–6 weeks · Written findingsPrototype build
Where a study is not enough and the answer only appears in a working artefact. We build the narrowest thing that exercises the uncertain part — not a product, not a pilot — and report where it holds, where it fails, and what production would demand of it.
4–10 weeks · Working artefactR&D engineering
Laboratory code that has proved itself and now has to survive contact with a production system. We make it maintainable, testable and observable, and we keep the technical documentation and experiment records that an R&D tax relief claim has to be able to stand on.
Ongoing · Code + evidence recordNotes
Volunos Labs Ltd was incorporated on 7 June 2026 and registered in Northern Ireland. The lab is new. There is no client list on this site because there is not yet a client list to publish, and we would rather say that plainly than borrow credibility we have not earned.
Current build: internal tooling for experiment records — a small system that captures hypothesis, method, parameters, result and date at the moment work happens rather than reconstructing it at year end. Two internal lines of enquiry are running alongside it, on surrogate models and on edge-side signal filtering. Both are unfunded and internal; neither is published.
If you have a question rather than a specification, that is the right thing to send. A paragraph describing what you are trying to find out, what you have already tried, and what would change if you knew the answer is enough to start. Write to research@volunos.uk — we reply within two working days.
Colophon — the mark
Two 45° strokes descend to a bottom-centre node. The right-hand stroke carries two units past the vertex — a needle that has overshot its datum and not yet settled. The horizontal tick across the opening is the reference level it is being measured against. Drawn only on grid lines and diagonals; no curves.
Send a question
Enquiries
One address, read by the people who would do the work
There is no contact form on this site. Enquiries go to research@volunos.uk and are read by the person who would run the study. We reply within two working days, including to say that a question is outside what we can usefully help with.
More on how an engagement is scoped and what we would need from you is on the working with us page.