ioncrest

Identity and coordination as physical observables

ioncrest is a research group studying how living, ecological, financial, and artificial systems keep coherence under turnover, noise, and adversarial pressure. We ask when "self" and coordinated action are properties not of labels but of network structure.

Agenda

Modern systems fail in populations. Organisms replace their molecules and remain themselves. Markets, infrastructures, and agent networks coordinate, drift, lock, or fragment. Labels, rules, and single-node scores miss the object that matters: whether a system is defending a coherent regime.

ioncrest develops the scientific instruments to make that object measurable across domains. We are building a research program on the physics of self and coordination, and the measurement layers those questions require.

Domains

A single scientific agenda, projected into several fields:

How We Work

Cross-domain instruments

Prefer questions and instruments that transfer across domains over single-domain heuristics

Rigorous claims

Separate mathematical claims under stated assumptions from empirical support under stated datasets

Honest evaluation

Demand baselines, ablations, and failure modes; treat negative results as first-class outputs

Open science

Keep public science open enough that others can challenge it

Evidence-first translation

Translate carefully: research first, products and standards only where the evidence warrants

Technical depth

Share technical depth through papers, diligence materials, and direct collaboration rather than public marketing copy

Principal Investigator

Marcos Polanco

Independent researcher · Oakland, CA · ioncrest.com

Marcos leads scientific direction for ioncrest. His background combines research on spectral and coordination questions with production systems that must survive contact with reality: multi-country infrastructure, AI platforms, and agentic runtimes with durable execution and human-in-the-loop governance. Earlier work on collaborative filtering appeared in Communications of the ACM.

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MS Computer Science (AI)

Georgia Institute of Technology

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BS Computer Systems Engineering

Stanford University

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Kauffman Fellows Program

Center for Venture Education

Contact

ioncrest

Marcos Polanco, Principal Investigator

Email: marcos@ioncrest.com

Web: https://ioncrest.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marcospolanco

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