William Waites

William Waites is a Senior Research Fellow at Quantum Software Lab. His research is in machine-assisted discovery: how concepts and methods move between fields, and how systems of AI agents can find and carry them. Much scientific advance is transport, a matured method from one field applied to another under a shared abstraction. At QSL he builds the machinery: pipelines of language-model agents that surface knowledge implicit in the research literature, vendor documentation, and practitioners' tacit experience, with adversarial review and fact checking and with quantum computing as the testbed. Reliability here is a problem of structure. What an agent can see, what it can affect, and how the pieces are wired together govern collective behaviour more than any prompt does. His plumbing language, a typed coordination language whose compiler is formally verified in Rocq, makes those constraints explicit and checkable. His track record is one of transport between fields. He carried stochastic graph rewriting into epidemiology during COVID-19 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, web semantics into genetic circuit design, and category theory into simulation software. On ParaCrawl he mined web-scale parallel corpora for machine translation. He has held posts at Southampton and at Strathclyde, where he was a Chancellor's Fellow and Lecturer, and spent nearly two decades before academia as a consultant in network engineering and knowledge representation. His PhD is from Edinburgh and he is a Chartered Engineer.