University of Cambridge

Over the past year, Sadiq Jaffer and I have been getting an object lesson in how the modern Internet handles researcher access to data, as we've been downloading tens of millions of research papers towards our Conservation Evidence project.

Thoughts on the National Data Library and private research data

I thought I’d kick off my Citrix blog with a question I get pretty often from Linux enthusiasts: how to install unsupported Linux distributions on XenServer 4.1.  The most common solution people find is to use the "Other Install Media" template, insert the distribution installation CD, and find that the mouse cursor doesn’t work when they boot into X11.

Installing Ubuntu on XenServer

Josh Millar just released our latest preprint on how to make sense of the growing number of dedicated, ultra-low-power 'neural network accelerators' that are found in many modern embedded chipsets. My interest in this derives from wanting to decouple from the cloud when it comes to low-latency local environments, and this needs fast tensor operations in hardware.

New preprint on benchmarking ultra-low power neural accelerators

Using computational SSDs for vector databases   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Sadiq Jaffer. Large pre-trained models can be used to embed media/documents into concise vector representations with the property that vectors that are "close" to each other are semantically related.

Using computational SSDs for vector databases

A hardware description language using OCaml effects   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with KC Sivaramakrishnan and Andy Ray. Programming FPGAs using functional programming languages is a very good fit for the problem domain.

A hardware description language using OCaml effects

Josh Millar presented our work on biodiversity sensing over at ACM Sensys 2024 in China. The full set of papers and demos has a range of impressive work on sensor networks, and some that stood out to me follow.

Presented poster at Sensys on low-power biodiversity monitoring

It's about the time of the academic year to come up with project ideas! KC Sivaramakrishnan, Andy Ray and I have been looking into FPGA/OCaml matters recently so I thought I'd review the latest in the land of Webassembly for non-traditional hardware targets.

Webassembly on exotic architectures (a 2025 roundup)

Access to reliable and timely scientific evidence is utterly vital for the practise of responsible policymaking, especially with all the turmoil in the world these days. At the same time, the evidence base on which use to make these decisions is rapidly morphing under our feet; the first entirely AI-generated paper passed peer review at an ICLR workshop today.

A fully AI-generated paper just passed peer review; notes from our evidence synthesis workshop

Distributed programming frameworks like Hadoop and Dryad are popular for performing computation over large amounts of data. The reason is programmer convenience: they accept a query expressed in a simple form such as MapReduce, and automatically take care of distributing computation to multiple hosts, ensuring the data is available at all nodes that need it, and dealing with host failures and stragglers.

DataCaml: distributed dataflow programming in OCaml

The terms carbon credits and carbon offsets are often used interchangeably, but are in fact two distinct concepts. I've spent a nice Sunday morning reading up on some recent articles that Bhaskar Vira sent me which introduce a

 third

term, known as

 "carbon contributions"

. Rather than this adding confusion, I found it helped me clarify my own thoughts on the matter, which I note down here in draft form.

Disentangling carbon credits and offsets with contributions

ZFS replication strategies with encryption   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Becky Terefe-Zenebe. It is co-supervised with Mark Elvers. We are using ZFS in much of our Planetary Computing infrastructure due to its ease of remote replication. Therefore, its performance characteristics when used as a local filesystem are particularly interesting.

ZFS replication strategies with encryption

Every ten years, the city of Aarhus throws a giant conference to discuss new agendas for critical action and theory in computing.

Steps towards an ecology of the Internet

Habitat mapping of the Cairngormes Connect restoration area   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Isabel Mansley. It is co-supervised with David Coomes and Aland Chan.

Habitat mapping of the Cairngormes Connect restoration area

Evaluating a human-in-the-loop AI framework to improve inclusion criteria for evidence synthesis   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer.

Evaluating a human-in-the-loop AI framework to improve inclusion criteria for evidence synthesis

With the sunsetting of Equinix Metal I've also been migrating the Recoil machines over to new hosts in Mythic Beasts. This time around, rather than manually setting up services, I've turned to a nice new tool called Komodo which helps with deploying Docker containers across multiple servers. Unlike many other container management solutions, Komodo is refreshingly simple.

Using Komodo to manage Docker compose on a small cluster

Using graph theory to define data-driven ecoregion and bioregion maps   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Daniele Baisero and Michael Dales.

Using graph theory to define data-driven ecoregion and bioregion maps

Bidirectional Hazel to OCaml programming   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Max Carroll. It is co-supervised with Patrick Ferris and Cyrus Omar. Hazel is a pure subset of OCaml with a live functional programming environment that is able to typecheck, manipulate, and even run incomplete programs.

Bidirectional Hazel to OCaml programming

Effects based scheduling for the OCaml compiler pipeline   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Lucas Ma. It is co-supervised with David Allsopp. In order to compile the OCaml program foo.ml containing: Stdlib.print_endline "Hello, world"  the OCaml compilers only require the compiled stdlib.cmi interface to exist in order to determine the type of Stdlib.print_endline.

Effects based scheduling for the OCaml compiler pipeline

Autoscaling geospatial computation with Python and Yirgacheffe   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Michael Dales. Python is a popular tool for geospatial data-science, but it, along with the GDAL library, handle resource management poorly. Python does not deal with parallelism well and GDAL can be a memory hog when parallelised.

Autoscaling geospatial computation with Python and Yirgacheffe

This week I've been reading three really nice pieces of work by my colleagues, in the form of a review paper on biodiversity and AI, a benchmark for 3D forest reconstruction using laser scanners and a mobile app for measuring the width of tree trunks. A real bonanza for forest lovers!

A trio of papers I read on biodiversity and forests this week

I started pushing OCaml Docker images over to the Docker Hub in around 2017, to support the burgeoning automated build infrastructure around the use of the language. Back then, OCaml 4.06 was the latest release, and so I wrote an ocaml-version library to track the release metadata.

Are you still using OCaml 4.08 or earlier? If so, we need to know

Now that I've switched to a new website, I'm working on open-sourcing its components. I've got a lot of small OCaml scripts that are all work-in-progress, and so not quite suitable to be published to the central opam-repository but I still need be able to run them conveniently on my own self-hosted infrastructure.

How to publish custom Homebrew taps for OCaml

Smita Vijayakumar went along to Seattle to SOCC 2024 to present her PhD research on Murmuration. This is a new scheduler for Kubernetes that allows for 15%--25% faster job completion times than the default scheduler for different job arrival characteristics in datacenters that are very busy.

Paper on scheduling for reduced tail task latencies

I got invited by Sertaç Sehlikoglu to deliver a lecture to the Masters students down at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. I talked about the recent work on planetary computing, with an overview of the LIFE and FOOD papers.

Mapping greener futures with planetary computing

3D printing the planet (or bits of it)   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Finley Stirk. It is co-supervised with Michael Dales. Thanks to a combination of satellite information, remote sensors and data-science, we now are able to reason about places all over the globe from the comfort of our desks and offices.

3D printing the planet (or bits of it)

I was gobsmacked to get a note from the SIGARCH ASPLOS steering committee that our 2013 paper "Unikernels: library operating systems for the cloud" won the most influential paper award at the conference last week! I couldn't make it to Rotterdam myself due to the travel time, but Richard Mortier was already there and so accepted the award on the whole team's behalf!

Unikernels wins the ASPLOS most influential paper award

Runtimes à la carte: crossloading native and bytecode OCaml   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Jeremy Chen. It is co-supervised with David Allsopp.

Runtimes à la carte: crossloading native and bytecode OCaml

An access library for the world crop, food production and consumption datasets   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Alison Eyres and Thomas Ball. Agricultural habitat degradation is a leading threat to global biodiversity.

An access library for the world crop, food production and consumption datasets

We've uploaded a revised preprint on our ongoing work on quantifying the biodiversity cost of global food consumption, lead by Thomas Ball. This is based on the recently published LIFE metric, combined with supply chain data and provenance modeling.

Updated preprint on quantifying biodiversity cost of food consumption

After some years of hard work, our Mapping LIFE on Earth biodiversity metric was published today in a special issue of the Royal Society Philosophical Transactions B! The idea behind LIFE is that although human-driven habitat loss is known to be the greatest cause of the biodiversity crisis, we do not yet have robust spatially explicit metrics that

 quantify

the relative impacts of human actions on species extinctions.

LIFE metric published in Royal Society Phil Trans B

Sophie Chapman lead an effort to explore a novel legal framework for forest carbon credits that separates carbon tenure (i.e. title and associated property rights to the land and trees which store the carbon) from the carbon rights (i.e. title and associated rights to monetise and manage the credits which symbolically represent the carbon stored in the trees), while also specifying the relationship between the carbon tenure and the carbon

Published a legal perspective on high integrity forest carbon credits

We have just updated our preprint on using LLMs for evidence decision support with more evaluation results and corrections from peer review.  See also the fantastic EEG seminar talk that the student group who worked on this over the summer gave towards the end of last year.

Updated preprint on LLMs for evidence-based decision support

Back in July 2024, a large group of conservation and computer scientists got together in the CCI to prioritise the storm of AI-related projects that have been kicking off around the world. Our key goal was to harness AI to accelerate the positive impact of conservation efforts, while minimising harm caused through either the direct or indirect use of AI technologies.

Horizon scan on AI and conservation published

Josh Millar and I have been having great fun designing embedded systems for cooperative biodiversity monitoring. Josh presented our work over at LOCO 2024 with an abstract on the Terracorder project. Read more if you enjoy a combination of machine learning and ESP32 hacking.

Cooperative Sensor Networks for Long-Term Biodiversity Monitoring

Ryan Gibb and I have been thinking about how the current Internet architecture fails to treat the carbon emissions associated with networked services as a first-class metric. So when the LOCO conference came up, we tried extending the DNS with load balancing techniques to consider the carbon cost of scheduling decisions.

Prototyping carbon-aware domain name resolution

This is part 1 of 5 of a series of posts

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about ICFP 2025. The first outing of PROPL was last year in London, and this time around Dominic Orchard and I invited KC Sivaramakrishnan to be the PC chair and held it at ICFP/SPLASH. The uptake was encouraging, and we got enough submissions to have a proper published proceedings in the ACM Digital Library for the first time!

Programming for the Planet at ICFP/SPLASH 2025

I was a bit sleepy getting into the Royal Society Future of Scientific Publishing conference early this morning, but was quickly woken up by the dramatic passion on show as publishers, librarians, academics and funders all got together for a "frank exchange of views" at a meeting that didn't pull any punches! These are my hot-off-the-press livenotes and only lightly edited; a more cleaned up version will be available from the RS in due course.

Royal Society's Future of Scientific Publishing meeting

This is part 5 of a series of posts

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about ICFP 2025. In addition to giving a bunch of talks about Docker, post-POSIX and planetary computing, the greatest fun at a huge conference like ICFP and SPLASH is seeing talks given by my students (they grow up so fast!) and collaborators, and generally floating around random talks trying to deceipher ancient Greek lambdas floating on a projector.

What I learnt at ICFP/SPLASH 2025 about OCaml, Hazel and FP

This is part 3 of 5 of a series of posts

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about ICFP 2025. It's been about six years since we wrote the papers on parallelism and effects, and four years since we helped to release upstream OCaml 5.0 with multicore support, a mammoth effort that took up years of work for my OCaml Labs and Tarides crew.

Jane Street and Docker on moving to OCaml 5 at ICFP/SPLASH 2025

You won’t be surprised to hear that we spend a lot of time improving XenApp performance when running on XenServer. Although there are some good benchmark comparisons available (such as the Tolly Group report), I still get a lot of customers asking about what the “secret sauce” is. I sat down with George Dunlap, the lead XenServer performance engineer to chat about the very first optimisation we did back in XenServer 4.0 last year.

Shedding light on XenApp on XenServer performance tuning

Over in my EEG group, we have a

 lot

of primary and secondary datasets lying around: 100s of terabytes of satellite imagery, biodiversity data, academic literature, and the intermediate computations that go along with them. Our trusty central shared storage server running TrueNAS stores data in ZFS and serves it over NFSv4 to a bunch of hosts.

Semi distributed filesystems with ZFS and Sanoid

Like many others, my website is under a constant barrage of crawling from bots. I need to figure out which one is hosing me, but I am also resisting having third-party trackers of any form. I took a look at hosting a Plausible instance as OCaml does, but it's yet another service to run and maintain.

Viewing web logs the old fashioned way with Goaccess

In my earlier note about how AI should unite conservation, I talked about the robust debate ongoing within Cambridge about whether or not we're too "AI obsessed" and are losing track of our goals in the rush to adopt learning algorithms. Jacqueline Garget has written a brilliant roundup about how colleages like Sam Reynolds, Chris Sandbrook and Sadiq Jaffer in the CCI are leading conversations to make sure we advance with eyes wide open.

Humans are the ones that will save nature, helped by AI

What might a Dame of the Realm, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the latest member of the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee, and me all covet? That's right: a Junior Ranger badge from Shenandoah National Park! After an intense few days, Bill Sutherland, Julia P.G. Jones, EJ Milner-Gulland and I headed into nature to experience the spectacular landscapes of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and do some birding.

We become Junior Rangers at Shenandoah

Here are the various repos used to create the interactive teaching environment we use for 1A Foundations of Computer Science in Cambridge. It may be useful to other professors who are using OCaml in their courses.

Foundations of Computer Science

Happy new 2026 everyone! I've had a wonderful journey through Udaipur and the lake palaces, and am currently in Vijayawada exploring my ancestral village for the next few days. I've caught up on some reading, so here are my book thoughts (and podcasts for the first time) from the past year!

Happy new year and my fave readings of the year

I was not expecting to find a bunch of activist librarians at the lovely spires of King's College Chapel last week, but I was very glad that I did! I gave a talk to the Confederation of Open Access Repositories group that was having a meeting about "Turning scholarly publishing on its head". Luckily, I had my budding Four Ps for Collective Intelligence fresh on my brain, so I discussed it with the assembled librarians.

Publish, Review, Curate to upend scholarly publishing

I've just released geotessera 0.7 to pypi for our TESSERA geospatial foundation model, following on from the first release earlier this year. To recap:  With this new release, there's convenient documentation to show how you can freely access 150TB+ of CC-BY-licensed embeddings of the earth's surface.

GeoTessera 0.7 out with efficient sampling and Zarr support

The exam marking is over, and a glorious Cambridge summer awaits! This year, we have a sizeable cohort of undergraduate and graduate interns joining us from next week. This note serves as a point of coordination to keep track of what's going on, and I'll update it as we get ourselves organised.

EEG internships for the summer of 2025

Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Gabriel Mahler. It is co-supervised with Silviu Petrovan. The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme aims to provide robust population estimates for the beloved hedgehog. The People's Trust for Endangered Species has been coordinating the programme.

Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs

Validating predictions with ranger insights to enhance anti-poaching patrol strategies in protected areas   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Hannah McLoone. It is co-supervised with Charles Emogor and Rob Fletcher. Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, underscoring the critical role of protected areas (PAs) in conserving threatened species and ecosystems.

Validating predictions with ranger insights to enhance anti-poaching patrol strategies in protected areas

Low power audio transcription with Whisper   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Dan Kvit. It is co-supervised with Josh Millar. The rise of batteryless energy-harvesting platforms could enable ultra-low-power, long-term, maintenance-free deployments of sensors.

Low power audio transcription with Whisper

Our paper on how the careful design of LLMs is crucial for expert-level evidence retrieval has been published today in PLOS One and is available fully open access! In a nutshell, we tested 10 LLMs with six different retrieval strategies on their ability to answer questions related to conservation, benchmarked against the Conservation Evidence database that has been hand-assembled by experts over the last two decades.

Out-of-the-box LLMs are not ready for conservation decision making

Evaluating LLMs for providing evidence-based information on conservation actions   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Radhika Agrawal. It is co-supervised with Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer. We are building a Conservation Co-Pilot to improve worldwide conservation action through evidence-driven insights.

Evaluating LLMs for providing evidence-based information on conservation actions

The sister conference to PROPL was held late last year in Scotland with a bumper attendance from Cambridge. All of the talks from it are now available online at YouTube, or on our ad-free EEG video site.

Talks from LOCO24 are now available online

Josh Millar has just released the latest survey paper he lead on energy-aware approaches to optimise deep-learning training and inference on embedded devices, such as those benchmarked in "Benchmarking Ultra-Low-Power µNPUs" recently.  Any comments, please do let any of us know!

New preprint survey on energy-aware deep learning on embedded hardware

Battery-free wildlife monitoring with Riotee   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Dominico Parish. It is co-supervised with Josh Millar. Monitoring wildlife in the field today relies heavily on battery-powered devices, like GPS collars or acoustic recorders.

Battery-free wildlife monitoring with Riotee

Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry   This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is currently being worked on by Beatrice Spence, Arissa-Elena Rotunjanu and Anna Yiu. It is co-supervised with Tiffany Ki and Edgar Turner.

Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry

Customers of online services may want to take carbon emissions into account when deciding which service to use, but it's currently difficult to do so due to the lack of reliable emissions data that is comparable across online services.

Towards verifiable, privacy-preserving carbon emissions claims

All the work we've been doing on biodiversity (such as LIFE) comes at a fairly large computation and storage cost due to the amount of data that we churn through. This gets worse when you consider the exploratory nature of science -- we sometimes just need to mess around with the large dataset to test hypotheses which are often shown to be wrong.

Towards a frugal userspace for Linux

We have just uploaded a preprint on using LLMs for conservation evidence, based on our work on large-scale crawling of the academic literature. Well done in particular to Radhika Iyer for having done the bulk of the evaluation on this as part of a very productive summer internship with us!

Preprint on using LLMs to for evidence-based decision support

After some time away from cloud computing (due to my new focus on conservation research), I served on the ACM SOCC 2024 program committee. It was quite interesting seeing the massive shift away from "traditional" cloud research (such as consensus protocols) towards many submissions aimed at accelerating machine learning workloads.

On the SOCC 2024 PC

I've been building some big collective knowledge systems recently, both for scholarly literature or to power large-scale observational foundation models. While the modalities of knowledge in these systems are very different, they share a common set of design principles I've noticed while building individual pieces. A good computer architecture is one that can be re-used, and I've been mulling over what this exactly is for some time.

Four Ps for Building Massive Collective Knowledge Systems

This is part 4 of 5 of a series of posts

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about ICFP 2025. After the excitement of presenting my Docker experience report, I went straight into giving a keynote talk at VMIL 2025.

It's time to go post-POSIX at ICFP/SPLASH 2025

The BIOMASS forest mission satellite was successfully boosted into space a couple of days ago, after decades of development from just down the road in Stevenage. I'm excited by this because it's the first global-scale P-band SAR instrument that can penetrate forest canopys to look underneath. This, when combined with hyperspectral mapping will give us a lot more insight into global tree health.

BIOMASS launches to measure forest carbon flux from space

Our neighbours France and the UK announced a Franco-British AI collaboration a few months ago dubbed the Entente CordIAle. Last week we held a couple of days of workshops with our Oxford and French buddies deep diving into details of what a partnership might actually involve; a particular pleasure with France given my group's long history of working with Inria on OCaml and other open source projects.

The AI French Connection to the Practice of Science

Apple made a notable announcement in WWDC 2025 that they've got a new containerisation framework in the new Tahoe beta. This took me right back to the early Docker for Mac days in 2016 when we announced the first mainstream use of the hypervisor framework, so I couldn't resist taking a quick peek under the hood.

Under the hood with Apple's new Containerization framework

I got to shake Jensen Huang's hand as he received the 2025 Hawking Fellowship this evening at the Cambridge Union! He's a fitting winner for this award; he's not only tech's longest running CEO (33 years!), but also a founding engineer who deeply understands the technology stack. He also bucks the trend among bigtech and famously doesn't believe in firing people, preferring to "torture them into greatness"

 [1]

instead.

Jensen Huang receives the Hawking Fellowship at Cambridge

There's a buzz forming around the upcoming AI Impact Summit next year in India, following up the AI Safety Summit here and the France Action Summit earlier this year. I headed down to a couple of events in London this week to help set the agenda, particularly around the importance of FAIR and ethical AI for sustainability being on the political agenda.

On the path to the UK/India AI Summit with OpenUK and the ATI

I had an amazingly fun week at ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore; it was the first time that these two major programming languages conferences were held simultaneously. My submissions turned into a bit of a success disaster; I ended up chairing a workshop, giving several talks and a keynote, and organising a tutorial, and helping out a bunch of colleague and students.

A Roundup of ICFP/SPLASH 2025 happenings

This is part 2 of 5 of a series of posts

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about ICFP 2025. Several extensions to "oxidize" OCaml (Rust performancew with ML ergonomics!) have been developing rapidly in a fork called OxCaml. I helped an intrepid crew from Jane Street, IIT-M, Tarides, Brown and Cambridge pull together a really fun tutorial in ICFP 2025 that you can try out too!

Holding an OxCaml tutorial at ICFP/SPLASH 2025

A world without nature feels rather impermanent, doesn't it? It's difficult to imagine a healthy future without clean air, fresh water and diverse wildlife. Yet important policy is being decided at the moment that will sideline "nature-based solutions" for net-zero carbon targets.

Do not rule out nature from climate action; an open letter

Choosing where we source the food that we eat makes a difference to the environment, but by how much? After churning through around 100 petabytes of data, beginning with our LIFE metric and moving onto food provenance maps and import/export data for the world, we now know the answer can vary by

 three orders of magnitude

for species extinction risks.

Exploring the biodiversity impacts of what we choose to eat

We've been having great fun at the EEG recently releasing embeddings of our new TESSERA geospatial foundation model. A foundation model is designed to be used for downstream tasks without having to retrain a full model for every individual task.

GeoTessera Python library released for geospatial embeddings

Since I wrote about the new ATProto-powered Tangled Git forge a few months ago, it's come along by leaps and bounds! First, and most excitingly, they've added continuous integration via Spindles which are built in a nice ATProto style: The pipelines are Nix-only right now, so I braved using it

 [1]

for a new GPS Exchange Format library in OCaml that I wrote.

mlgpx is the first Tangled-hosted package available on opam

I've just taken Kyutai's speech-to-text model for a spin on my Mac laptop, and it's stunningly good. As background, this is what the prolific Laurent Mazare has been hacking on; he has made a ton of contributions to the OCaml community as well, such as ocaml-torch and starred in a very fun Signals to Threads episode on machine learning at Jane Street back in 2020.

Using Kyutai's low latency audio models on macOS in one command

I'm emerging reenergised from an epic trip to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where we spent weeks in the wilderness gathering ground truth for TESSERA (and enjoying the wildlife!). Piecing together our locations was quite important, and so I took a cue from Ryan Gibb and deployed OwnTracks and HomeAssistant Device Tracker before I headed out there.

Tracking locations with OwnTracks, Life Cycle and Home Assistant

I've been hacking with Sadiq Jaffer (^), Jon Ludlam (^) and Ryan Gibb (^) on various approaches to improving the agentic coding experience for OCaml. We jotted down our notes in a draft paper to keep track of everything going on, including summarising previous experiments with Qwen3 for FoCS. Since then, there's been a flurry of extra activity from others which we need to integrate!

Cresting the OCaml AI humps

For the past few years, Sadiq Jaffer and I been working with our colleagues in Conservation Evidence to do analysis at scale on the academic literature. Getting local access to millions of fulltext papers has not been without drama, but made possible thanks to huge amounts of help from our University Library who helped us navigate our relationships with scientific publishers.

Is AI poisoning the scientific literature? Our comment in Nature

I stayed on for a few days extra in Washington DC after the biodiversity extravaganza to attend a workshop at legendary National Geographic Basecamp.

Visiting National Geographic HQ and the Urban Exploration Project

We've been happy users of Matrix for our group communications in the EEG. Today we've been bringing in more members of the wider group to using it instead of Slack. As part of that, I've set up a cool bot called Hookshot which allows Matrix to be connected to external services such as GitHub and Atom/RSS feeds. This is a test post to demonstrate to the members of the EEG how Matrix and Atom work!

Entering the Matrix with Hookshot

I spent a couple of days at the National Academy of Sciences in the USA at the invitation of the Royal Society, who held a forum on "Measuring Biodiversity for Addressing the Global Crisis". It was a packed program for those working in evidence-driven conservation:  I was honoured to talk about our work on using AI to "connect the dots" between disparate data like the academic literature and remote observations at scale.

What I learnt at the National Academy of Sciences US-UK Forum on Biodiversity

I joined Cambridge's loftily named Environment Sustainability Strategy Committee this academic year, and have attended a couple of meetings with the latest one being held today. While a lot of what goes on is intricately tied into the University's rather special governance structure and the complexity of the College system, there has been significant progress on making all of this more visible more widely.

Learnings from the Cambridge Environmental Sustainability Committee

Carl Edward Rasmussen recently gave a great talk in our group about his thoughts on mechanisms against climate change. He persuasively argued that the Paris Agreement was doing more harm than good by giving the

 illusion

of being a concrete agreement, but is in reality a huge distraction. Our actual emissions have increased since the Paris agreement was signed!

The Cambridge "Green Blue" competition to reduce emissions

I had a tremendous time participating in last year's horizon scan of AI and Conservation, which laid out the opportunities that technological progress from AI (a catchall phrase here) could bring to hard-working conservation practitioners.

Technology needs to unite conservation, not divide it

The European Space Agency organised the first conference on Biodiversity Insights from Space (BioSpace) in February this year, and it seems like it was a huge success. The conference itself sold out within days, and the program was so packed that the organisers had to split it into multiple chunks during the week to cope with everyone.

ESA's first BioSpace conference seems a huge success

Dominic Orchard and I had a blast running the first PROPL workshop a couple of years ago, with a full room and engaged audience in POPL in London. Last year, our sister conference LOCO took over, and it's our turn again this year! PROPL will return for a second outing in October, co-located with ICFP/SPLASH in Singapore in October.

2nd Programming for the Planet workshop CFP out

Our recently published LIFE biodiversity metric has just been integrated into a newly recognised Official Statistic from the UK government! This integrates the core LIFE biodiversity metric with food provenance data to track the environmental impacts of our consumption habits. I must admit that I'd not heard of "Official Statistics" before this, so I did a bit of research.

LIFE becomes an Official Statistic of the UK government

I've been an avid user of GitHub since its launch, and it really has revolutionised how communities come together to work on open source. In recent years though, I find myself utterly overwhelmed by its notifications and want to experiment with alternative workflows.

Socially self-hosting source code with Tangled on Bluesky

Srinivasan Keshav organised this week's EEG group discussion on what AI tools we use for our daily work. I was immediately struck by how

 few

tools there are that are actually making us more productive, so I jotted down notes as the discussion was going on. Personally, the only tool I've found that's (only just recently) making me more productive is agentic coding, which I wrote about a few days ago.

Our EEG group discussion on 'useful' AI tools

Yaron Minsky nerdsniped me last week into getting OCaml to drive the 80s-retro RGB Matrix displays. I grabbed one from the local Pi Store and soldered it together with help from Michael Dales. But instead of writing OCaml bindings by hand, we thought we'd try out the latest agentic CLI called Claude Code released last week to see if we could entirely autogenerate the bindings.

Oh my Claude, we need agentic copilot sandboxing right now

The IETF announced their new AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF), which will

 "work on standardizing building blocks that allow for the expression of preferences about how content is collected and processed for Artificial Intelligence models"

. This is quite well timed; the IETF tries not to standardise too early before there is running code but also needs to move before it's too late and a bad defacto standard is chosen.

The AIETF arrives, and not a moment too soon

While Bluesky is taking off like a rocket, a number of us moving towards self sovereign digital infrastructure have been looking at how to use the Bluesky network for other uses than just short-form notes. This is possible because of my colleague Martin Kleppmann's hard work on the "AT Protocol" that underpins the Bluesky network.

Using AT Proto for more than just Bluesky posts

With the vast amount of data we have these days for our planetary computing processing, it's naturally tempting to use more hardware offload. The obvious choice, GPGPUs, are not a great fit for the problem due to the difficulty of unlocking high data parallelism for geospatial data. So it's back to an old technology I worked on twelve years ago in the form of FPGAs!

Programming FPGAs using OCaml

Sadiq Jaffer sent along this piece in The Conversation last week about the remarkable number of academic papers that are now AI generated. The numbers of these papers are probably underestimated:  What caught my eye in this article is their development of the Problematic Paper Screener, which the good folks at Retraction Watch developed. It works with high precision to detect papers issued by grammar-based generators.

Fake papers abound in the literature

There's a letter in Science today from a bunch of well known remote sensing researchers that make the unusual point that modern satellite resolution is getting

 too

good to be accurate for forest carbon estimation. The lead author Laura Duncanson is a remote sensing scientist at Maryland who works on the incredible GEDI instrument on the International Space Station.

Satellites are getting too good for forest carbon?

Srinivasan Keshav posted a link to this excellent deepdive by Prasad Raje of Udemy into the advances that DeepSeek R1 has made from a perspective of the core technology.

 References

Vaswani et al (2023). Attention Is All You Need. arXiv.

Deepdive into Deepseek advances

My colleagues Thomas Swinfield and Eleanor Toye Scott lead the publication of a comprehensive report of the steps the voluntary carbon market needs to take to restore its scientific credibility, with input from many of us in 4C and beyond. This paper represents three years of hard work from the team on trying to blend remote sensing with carbon quantification.

Position paper on scientifically credible carbon credits

This website has been through quite a few iterations over the years. The first version in 1998 was written in Perl and hosted on OpenBSD; the second was rewritten in 2000 when I got commit access to PHP; the third rewrite became a hybrid OCaml/PHP/Perl special in 2004 in Blosxom; then the forth rewrite around 2013 got turned into a unikernel in MirageOS;

Arise Bushel, my sixth generation oxidised website

I'm at the Royal Society this morning for the 2 day programme on "How does ecological risk related to commercial risk?", and am reporting on the morning session. The full program is being livestreamed so please do dial in if the below notes seem interesting to you. I put this note up almost live, so any errors below are my own.

Anil Madhavapeddy's feed

Installing Ubuntu on XenServer