Polymath Global
Systems engineering, security research, and public writing.
Polymath Global is Joe Waller's public research and engineering practice — original security and data-systems projects, practical setup and security guides, and essays on the institutions technology runs through.
01Original work
Projects
Original engineering and research, spanning governed development tooling, knowledge-graph retrieval, privacy-preserving security research, and quantitative trading systems — six active projects, each documented end to end with its own technical report.
02Public guides
IT Help
Ten public guides, written to be followed once from the top and to work the first time. They begin with a first working Python setup and run through publishing, authorized security research, and support for the UNC data-science class notes.
None of them asks for an account, a credential, or access to anyone's infrastructure.
Open IT HelpSet up and run
A project-local Python environment, the right dependencies, and a verified CodeSentinel install, on Windows, macOS or Linux.
Go to this sectionWrite and publish
Notebooks with working mathematics, and pages a dyslexic or tired reader can follow the first time through.
Go to this sectionAuthorized security research
Evidence preservation and public-exposure review, with every method kept inside the authorization that allows it.
Go to this sectionClass resources
Public notes from the UNC data-science courses, and a clear route for corrections, clarifications and new topics.
Go to this section03Essays and papers
Writings
Seven essays and two technical papers. The essays reason from evidence about where technology meets the institutions around it: causal questions in history and economics, public-sector AI and its regulation, elder care, and the trust people place in automated systems.
The papers document the privacy-preserving detection research behind Calamum Observer.
Read the writingsCausal reasoning
2 essaysWhat would have happened otherwise? Potential outcomes applied to measuring the importance of historical events, and to how much any president really moves the economy.
Civic technology and governance
2 essaysWhy machine learning in public service must leave authority with human operators, and a builder's view of the EU AI Act: ethics, regulatory risk and provenance.
Care, labor, and institutions
2 essaysHome-care robotics as an alternative to the nursing home, and the surveillance and digital ageism that threaten older people's right to age at home.
Trust and autonomy
1 essayHow dispositional, situational and learned trust shape whether people take up intelligent systems at all.
Technical papers 2 papers · April 2026
The research behind Calamum Observer: a detection framework that screens harmful online activity from structural metadata alone, without keeping message text, and an ethical analysis of how research like it should be conducted when the environment under study is itself sensitive or dangerous.
Go to the papers
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