Tweag.io: Open Source for fast-running, reliable and sustainable applications

Then Benjamin Robin, Chief Financial Officer came to present Tweag.io and its activities. “We are a software innovation laboratory created in 2013 by its current president Mathieu Boespflug, and a small group of mathematicians and experts in formal methods and distributed systems, who originally worked for the American pharmaceutical company Amgen. Eventually they developed an Open Source module for the Haskell community, an old functional programming language now resurfacing with the ability to integrate different types of languages into the same code.”

This developer know-how has been noticed by industrialists who have entrusted other developments to the team, which now counts about forty engineers. “Thanks to new technologies, we can easily find talent wherever it is, which explains why we now have employees of about twenty nationalities most of whom working from their countries of residence. Thanks to these different areas of expertise, we are able to meet challenges of our clients in very different fields (AI, Blockchain, Bioinformatics, Cloud Infrastructures...)”.

Such complementarity of different areas of expertise allows Tweag.io to rely on 80% international customer base, supporting it from the first developments to the implementation of their applications on generally specialized themes. “Our commitment to work for our partners is based on three qualifiers: Fast in execution; Correct in construction; Maintainable in time. This is how we have achieved two major contributions. Our team includes the inventors of Nix a programming language that consistently and reproducibly describes resource configuration systems in the cloud. It also includes the main contributors to the Haskell language, which rigidity experienced in the 80s and 90s is now forgotten, making its way into all subjects that require an extremely high level of data accuracy (medical analyses, Blockchain...)”.

Tweag.io has developed a number of libraries and tools in Open Source that allow you to switch from one language to another, especially between R and Haskell. Tweag.io also works on transcriptions between the Bazel open source production engine, developed by Google, and Haskell, or between the Spark and Haskell open source computing framework.

“We are working with our customers who generally play the game, to ensure that the majority of the projects we work on are Open Sourced. For example, we worked with Pfizer on a reproducible scientific process to sequence and analyze CRISPR genes in an automated way to reduce costs and delays. In bio-pharma, we are working with the Lyon-based Novadiscovery entity for which we have created an in-silico simulation tool of human physiology in Haskell, in order to reduce the cost of clinical trials by predicting the biochemical interactions involved in a treatment, so as to eliminate a certain number of physical tests, for what these can be managed”.

“We are working on Blockchain with IOHK, the creator of the Cardano crypto-currency, on the Plutus intelligent language that it uses as a support tool. Finally, we worked with the CEA on the industrialization of the analysis and processing of logs, bugs and anomalies generated by supercomputers which are, given the volume of data we are talking about, absolutely huge in terms of human processing, while in MLP we are able to tell the machine to find certain keywords, cross-check the information, eliminate waste and present to operators only what ''deserves'' to be processed”.