Xooplab is an open research collective operated by Xoop Innovation Labs Inc. in Toronto. We work on problems that sit between disciplines — the ones that fall through the cracks because they don't belong to any single field, journal, or department. And we do it in the open, with whoever's good enough to show up.
Four operating rules. They're load-bearing, not decorative.
Boards, problems, threads, and publications are public. The research isn't behind a login. We make money from applied work and IP, not from gating knowledge.
A reproducible result from an unaffiliated contributor outranks a confident claim from a famous one. We review work for scope and reproducibility, never for pedigree.
Especially for the soft, contested topics. If a claim can't be tested, we reframe it until it can — or we say plainly that it's a belief, not a finding.
Everything we publish is written for people and structured for machines. Discoverability is a research output, not a marketing chore.
Not products — disciplines. We hold open research across the fields where the hard, cross-disciplinary problems live, and keep every result legible to the people and the machines that want to build on it.
Money is software now. We work on the rails, risk models, and trust primitives that let value move as freely — and as accountably — as information does.
How built and natural space should be arranged is one of the oldest questions humans have asked. We formalise the priors — ancient and modern — into structured constraints a machine can reason over and test.
Markets and platforms publish more data than anyone audits. We build open, reproducible models of how value is created, captured, and distributed — instead of vibes and quarterly decks.
Living systems compute. We study the algorithms biology already runs and the tools that let us read, model, and design at the boundary of computation and life.
Identity, provenance, and interoperability for a web whose primary reader is increasingly a machine. We build the protocols that let humans and autonomous agents share infrastructure safely.
Risk is a coordination problem. We explore transparent, programmable insurance — pooling, pricing, and payout that anyone can inspect and that pays out without a fight.
Shared state without a trusted intermediary remains genuinely useful for a narrow, important set of problems. We work on the cases where decentralisation earns its cost.
The next networking substrate carries information that cannot be copied or silently observed. We track what quantum links make newly possible — and what they break.
Artificial intelligence is the connective tissue of nearly everything we build. We work on the models, agents, and learning systems that let machines perceive, reason, and act — and, just as much, on keeping that intelligence open, legible, and accountable to the people it serves rather than sealed inside a black box.
Light, but real.
Each board has a steward responsible for scope, reproducibility review, and keeping the thread civil. Stewards are appointed by the collective, not self-anointed, and rotate. A board opens when three contributors commit to it and closes when its core question is answered or abandoned — both of which we record.
Applied work that emerges from a board and becomes commercial IP is assigned to Xoop Innovation Labs, with contributor credit and, where relevant, a stake. The principle: knowledge stays open; specific applied implementations can be owned. We'd rather be explicit about that than pretend the tension doesn't exist.
Researchers, builders, skeptics, and investors all use the same front door.