Notes · Updated 05 Aug 2026
Notes
A dated log of how the lab works and the standards it holds itself to. Written to be read by someone deciding whether to trust us with a question.
Put a question to the lab — write to research@volunos.uk
Answered inside 2 working daysBelfastApplied R&D
The log
The company's registered activities are software development (SIC 62012) and other research and experimental development on natural sciences and engineering (SIC 72190). The second of those is the one that describes what the lab is for.
Our storage conditions are written out in the privacy notice in plain language, and in enough detail that a supplier questionnaire can be answered from the record instead of in generalities. Send yours to research@volunos.uk and it comes back in writing, usually inside ten working days.
We keep our own tooling for experiment records. The premise is simple: a record written at the moment work happens is worth more than any amount of reconstruction afterwards, both scientifically and for anyone later assembling an R&D relief claim. The tool captures hypothesis, method, parameters, result and date with as little friction as we can manage, because a heavy system produces no record at all.
It runs across our own ledger, and it is the same discipline a client engagement gets: the technical record is written as the work happens and handed over with the findings.
Two lines of enquiry run alongside the tooling: surrogate models and the point at which their error changes a decision (entry 01), and edge-side signal filtering as a substitute for instrument cost (entry 02). Both are our own research, on synthetic, public and lab-captured data. We call something a result when there is evidence behind it we would defend; until then the ledger reports the method and what it measures.
A study that concludes an approach does not work is not a failed engagement. It is often the most valuable thing a research budget buys, because it removes a path before the path becomes a programme. We price and report negative findings exactly as we do positive ones, and any proposal we send will say so explicitly.
The corollary is that we will not take work where the answer is required to come out a particular way. If a study exists to justify a decision already made, it is not research and we are the wrong supplier.
Send the question, not the specification. One paragraph is a fine start: what you want to establish, which routes have already been tried, and what decision hangs on the answer. Put a question to the lab — write to research@volunos.uk and it comes back inside two working days, including when the honest reply is that this is not a question for us.
Standing positions
These do not change with the log and are worth stating once.
Evidence over assertion
Anything we tell you about what works should be traceable to something we measured, or attributed to someone else who measured it. Where we are extrapolating from experience rather than evidence, we will label it as such. Where we do not know, we will say we do not know.
Scope honesty
We will decline work that is outside what we can do well, and we will say who would be better placed where we can. The list of things we are not is on the working with us page and is meant seriously.
Illustrative material is labelled
Any interface, diagram or figure on this site that depicts a system rather than reporting a measurement is labelled as illustrative. There are no screenshots of client systems anywhere on this site, and there will not be unless a client asks us to publish one and agrees the wording.
Confidentiality by default
Material received during an engagement is confidential whether or not a non-disclosure agreement is in place, is used only for that engagement, and is returned or securely deleted at the end of it on request. Where a question can be answered with anonymised or synthetic data, we will propose that first.
The record outlives the engagement
We keep a contemporaneous technical record of research work because it is good practice, because it makes findings reproducible, and because an R&D relief claim eventually has to rest on something written down at the time. We produce and maintain that record. We are not tax advisers and the claim itself is a matter for yours.
Colophon
Mark: two 45° strokes to a bottom-centre node, the right-hand stroke carrying two units past the vertex — a needle that has overshot its datum and not yet settled — with a horizontal reference tick across the opening. Grid lines and diagonals only.
Set throughout in Newsreader, one typeface only. Hand-written HTML and CSS; no framework, no tracking, no analytics cookies.