I'm intrigued by this. Any names (projects/people/protocols) come to mind?

I'd call them both examples of applied cryptography research. I think these projects compare very, very closely to applied ML research:

They come out of industry research labs, are worked on by respected experts, usually involving some academics, ultimately you end up with an artifact beyond just a paper that is useful for something and improves upon the status quo.

I'm admittedly not a total expert, so I don't know how far down to the level of crypto "primitives" this kind of work goes, but I believe there is some effort to pick primitives that are difficult to "mess up" (think "bad primes") and I know tink actively prevents you from making bad choices in the cases where you are forced to make a choice.

Even more broadly, just consider any tptacek (who I should clarify is *not a researcher, lest he correct me) post on pgp/gpg email, or people like Matt Green (http://mattsmith.de/pdfs/DevelopersAreNotTheEnemy.pdf).

Edit: Some poking around also brought up this person: https://yaseminacar.de/, who has some interesting papers on similar subjects.

That doesn't mean what you think it means.