Cubical methods have played an important role in the development of Homotopy Type Theory and Univalent Foundations (HoTT/UF) in recent years. The original motivation behind these developments was to give constructive meaning to Voevodsky’s univalence axiom, but they have since then led to a range of new results. Among the achievements of these methods is the design of new type theories and proof assistants with native support for notions from HoTT/UF, syntactic and semantic consistency results for HoTT/UF, as well as a variety of independence results and establishing that the univalence axiom does not increase the proof theoretic strength of type theory. This paper is based on lecture notes that were written for the 2019 Homotopy Type Theory Summer School at Carnegie Mellon University. The goal of these lectures was to give an introduction to cubical methods and provide sufficient background in order to make the current research in this very active area of HoTT/UF more accessible to newcomers. The focus of these notes is hence on both the syntactic and semantic aspects of these methods, in particular on cubical type theory and the various cubical set categories that give meaning to these theories.

We show that Church’s thesis, the axiom stating that all functions on the naturals are computable, does not hold in the cubical assemblies model of cubical type theory. We show that nevertheless Church’s thesis is consistent with univalent type theory by constructing a lex modality in cubical assemblies such that Church’s thesis holds in the corresponding reflective subuniverse.

This article proposes a way of doing type theory informally, assuming a cubical style of reasoning. It can thus be viewed as a first step toward a cubical alternative to the program of informalization of type theory carried out in the homotopy type theory book for dependent type theory augmented with axioms for univalence and higher inductive types. We adopt a cartesian cubical type theory proposed by Angiuli, Brunerie, Coquand, Favonia, Harper, and Licata as the implicit foundation, confining our presentation to elementary results such as function extensionality, the derivation of weak connections and path induction, the groupoid structure of types, and the Eckmman–Hilton duality.

We develop bicategory theory in univalent foundations. Guided by the notion of univalence for (1-)categories studied by Ahrens, Kapulkin, and Shulman, we define and study univalent bicategories. To construct examples of univalent bicategories in a modular fashion, we develop displayed bicategories, an analog of displayed 1-categories introduced by Ahrens and Lumsdaine. We demonstrate the applicability of this notion and prove that several bicategories of interest are univalent. Among these are the bicategory of univalent categories with families and the bicategory of pseudofunctors between univalent bicategories. Furthermore, we show that every bicategory with univalent hom-categories is weakly equivalent to a univalent bicategory. All of our work is formalized in Coq as part of the UniMath library of univalent mathematics.

We develop the Scott model of the programming language PCF in univalent type theory. Moreover, we work constructively and predicatively. To account for the non-termination in PCF, we use the lifting monad (also known as the partial map classifier monad) from topos theory, which has been extended to univalent type theory by Escardó and Knapp. Our results show that lifting is a viable approach to partiality in univalent type theory. Moreover, we show that the Scott model can be constructed in a predicative and constructive setting. Other approaches to partiality either require some form of choice or quotient inductive-inductive types. We show that one can do without these extensions.

The ALEA Coq library formalizes measure theory based on a variant of the Giry monad on the category of sets. This enables the interpretation of a probabilistic programming language with primitives for sampling from discrete distributions. However, continuous distributions have to be discretized because the corresponding measures cannot be defined on all subsets of their carriers. This paper proposes the use of synthetic topology to model continuous distributions for probabilistic computations in type theory. We study the initial σ-frame and the corresponding induced topology on arbitrary sets. Based on these intrinsic topologies, we define valuations and lower integrals on sets and prove versions of the Riesz and Fubini theorems. We then show how the Lebesgue valuation, and hence continuous distributions, can be constructed.