ZFS replication strategies with encryption / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. Some questions that we need to answer about our uses of ZFS are:
- We intend to have an encrypted remote backups in several locations, but only a few of those hosts should have keys and the rest should use raw ZFS send streams.
- Does encryption add a significant overhead when used locally?
- Is replication faster if the source and target are both encrypted vs a raw send?
- We would typically have a snapshot schedule, such as hourly snapshots with a retention of 48 hours, daily snapshots with a retention of 14 days, and weekly snapshots with a retention of 8 weeks. As these snapshots build up over time, is there a performance degradation?
- Should we minimise the number of snapshots held locally, as this would allow faster purging of deleted files?
- How does ZFS send/receive compare to a peer-to-peer backup solution like Borg Backup, given that it gives a free choice of source and target backup file system and supports encryption?
- ZFS should have the advantage of knowing which blocks have changed between two backups, but potentially, this adds an overhead to day-to-day use.
- On the other hand, ZFS replicants can be brought online much more quickly, whereas Borg backup files need to be reconstructed into a usable filesystem.
ideasValidating predictions with ranger insights to enhance anti-poaching patrol strategies in protected areas / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. Yet, many of these are increasingly dismissed as "paper parks" due to poor management. Park rangers play a vital role in PA effectiveness by detecting and potentially deterring illegal activities. However, limited funding for PA management has led to low patrol frequency and detection rates, reducing the overall deterrent effect of ranger efforts. This resource scarcity often results in non-systematic patrol strategies, which are sub-optimal given that illegal hunters tend to be selective in where and when they operate.
The situation is poised to become more challenging as countries expand PA coverage under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—aiming to increase global PA area from 123 million km2 to 153 million km2 by 2030. Without a substantial boost in enforcement capacity, both existing and newly designated PAs will remain vulnerable. Continued overexploitation of wildlife threatens not only species survival but also ecosystem integrity and the well-being of local communities who rely on wildlife for food and income.
This project aims to combine data from rangers in multiple African protected areas and hunters around a single protected area (Nigeria) to improve the deterrence effect of ranger patrols by optimising ranger efforts and provide information on the economic impacts of improved ranger patrols on community livelihoods and well-being. We plan to deploy our models to rangers in the field via SMART, which is used in > 1000 PAs globally to facilitate monitoring and data collection during patrols.
The two main aims are to:
- develop an accessibility layer using long-term ranger-collected data
- validate the results of this layer, as well as those from other models developed, using ranger insights.
Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed 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.
Despite being the nation’s favourite mammal, there's a lot more to learn about hedgehog populations across the country. We do know that, although urban populations are faring better than their rural counterparts, overall hedgehogs are declining across Britain, so much so that they’re now categorised as Vulnerable to extinction. -- NHMP
The People's Trust for Endangered Species has been coordinating the programme. For the purposes of this project, we have access to:
- GPS data from over 100 tagged hedgehogs collected by Lauren Moore during her PhD to build predictive movement models.
- OpenStreetMap data about where hedgehogs probably shouldn't be (e.g. middle of a road) to help with species distribution modelling
- PTES also run the Hedgehog Street program which has the mapped locations of hedgehog highways across the UK to assess how effective they are.
- A new high-res map of the UK's hedgerows and stonewalls from Google DeepMind and Drew Purves.
Our initial efforts in the summer of 2025 will be to put together a high res map of UK hedgehog habitats, specifically brambles and likely urban habitats. Once that works, the plan is to apply some spatially explicit modeling, still focussing on the UK. This will involving exciting collaborating with the PTES who I'm looking forward to meeting!
Low power audio transcription with Whisper / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed 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.
This project explores the deployment of the OpenAI Whisper audio transcription model onto embedded devices, initially starting with the rPi and moving onto smaller devices.
Habitat mapping of the Cairngormes Connect restoration area / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Isabel Mansley. It is co-supervised with David Coomes and Aland Chan.
The Cairngorms Connect is the largest landscape restoration project in the UK. Four landowners (RSPB, Wildlands Ltd, FLS, and NatureScot) embarked on a 200-year vision to restore over 600 km2 of land in the Cairngorms National Park with an emphasis on natural processes.
In July, 2023, the Centre for Landscape Regeneration commissioned a flight over a 400 km2 stretch of land over the area, collecting both high resolution RGBI imagery (0.1m ground resolution) and LiDAR data. Various research projects were built on this dataset, including studies into carbon cycling, shrub ecology, tree regeneration, and deadwood detection.
Existing habitat maps of the area are based on Sentinel 2 satellite data at a ground resolution of 10m. While this dataset provides a good basis for some research objectives, a habitat map that could leverage the high resolution of the aerial imagery would potentially be able to capture fine-scale variations in habitat structure more accurately. This project involves applying new developments in geospatial machine learning (specifically the Tessera one developed locally in Cambridge) to achieve this.
Evaluating a human-in-the-loop AI framework to improve inclusion criteria for evidence synthesis / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer.
Whenever we do evidence synthesis (especially for conservation outcomes) to distil the world's scientific literature into actionable insights, we have to decide on what published studies we will include or exclude, and why they are categorised as such. This can be a challenging process, and sometimes inclusion criteria may not be very reproducible or clearly defined, leading to confusion between reviewers and more time-consuming reviews.
In AI-assisted review methods, we are increasingly finding that LLMs may interpret inclusion criteria differently to human reviewers, potentially because human experts may implicitly assume certain things that are not obvious to those working outside the review team (or interpret things differently to fellow reviewers). We trialled an informal process earlier this year to iterate over the inclusion/exclusion criteria for an evidence synthesis using synthetic studies that represent "edge cases", whereby it is difficult to agree on whether they should be in or out. Through back-and-forth with an LLM, human reviewers were able to refine and improve their inclusion criteria.
This project will build on this work to develop a prototype, open-source tool that enables users to refine their inclusion criteria with the help of an LLM chatbot. This will be extremely useful for anyone conducting any type of evidence synthesis and so has great potential to be an impactful project beyond "just" the field of conservation.
Evaluating LLMs for providing evidence-based information on conservation actions / Jun 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. Biodiversity loss is one of the biggest threats to our planet and to tackle it, we must improve the effectiveness of conservation action, which currently falls short of its full potential. This is because conservationists typically find it hard to access locally relevant evidence on what works to conserve biodiversity as research knowledge is not translated quickly or accessibly enough into policy and practice. We therefore need to accelerate the transfer of relevant, reliable evidence to decision-makers using more intuitive and interactive interfaces.
This project will use the comprehensive Conservation Evidence database (holding 8600 studies that have quantitatively tested 3600 actions) to evaluate the ability of a Mixture of Agents (MOA) approach, and/or individual LLMs, at providing rigorous evidence-based answers to priority questions from real conservationists.
This will extend our previous work that found that LLMs coupled with a hybrid retrieval strategy can answer multiple choice conservation questions as well as human experts. This will enable us to develop a "Conservation Co-Pilot" that can handle complex and nuanced questions from different users.
Using graph theory to define data-driven ecoregion and bioregion maps / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Daniele Baisero and Michael Dales.
Maps of biologically driven regionalization (e.g. ecoregions and bioregions) are useful in conservation science and policy as they help identify areas with similar ecological characteristics, allowing for more targeted, efficient, and ecosystem-specific management strategies. These regions provide a framework for prioritizing conservation efforts, monitoring biodiversity, and aligning policies across political boundaries based on ecological realities rather than arbitrary lines. However these products have historically been "hand drawn" by experts and are mostly based on plant distribution data only.
[…270 words]Runtimes à la carte: crossloading native and bytecode OCaml / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Jeremy Chen. It is co-supervised with David Allsopp.
In 1998, Fabrice le Fessant released Efuns ("Emacs for Functions"), an implementation of an Emacs-like editor entire in OCaml and which included a library for loading bytecode within native code programs[^1].
This nearly a decade before OCaml 3.11 would introduce Alain Frisch's native Dynlink support to OCaml. Natdynlink means that this original work has been largely forgotten, but there remain two interesting applications for being able to "cross-load" code compiled for the OCaml bytecode runtime in an OCaml native code application and vice versa:
- Native code OCaml applications could use OCaml as a scripting language without needing to include an assembler toolchain or solutions such as ocaml-jit.
- The existing bytecode REPL could use OCaml natdynlink plugins (
.cmxsfiles) directly, allowing more dynamic programming and exploration of high-performance libraries with the ease of the bytecode interpreter, but retaining the runtime performance of the libraries themselves.
Effects based scheduling for the OCaml compiler pipeline / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. This separate compilation technique allows modules of code to be compiled before the code they depend on has necessarily been compiled. When OCaml was first written, this technique was critical to reduce recompilation times. As CPU core counts increased through the late nineties and early 2000s, separate compilation also provided a parallelisation benefit, where modules which did not depend on each other could be compiled at the same time as each other benefitting compilation as well as recompilation.
For OCaml, as in many programming languages, the compilation of large code bases is handled by a separate build system (for example, dune, make or ocamlbuild) with the compiler driver (ocamlc or ocamlopt) being invoked by that build system as required. In this project, we'll investigate how to get the OCaml compiler itself to be responsible for exploiting available parallelism.
Bidirectional Hazel to OCaml programming / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. As a pure language with no effects, Hazel is a great choice for domains such as configuration languages where some control flow is needed, but not the full power of a general purpose programming language. On the other hand, Hazel only currently has an interpreter and so is fairly slow to evaluate compared to a full programming language such as OCaml.
[…277 words]Battery-free wildlife monitoring with Riotee / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. However, such devices are often deployed in remote environments, where battery replacement and data retrieval can be labour-intensive and time-consuming. Moving away from battery-powered field devices could radically reduce the environmental footprint and labour cost of wildlife monitoring. The rise of batteryless energy-harvesting platforms could enable ultra-low-power, long-term, maintenance-free deployments. However, existing battery-less devices are severely constrained, often unable to perform meaningful on-device computation such as ML inference or high-frequency audio capture.
This project explores the development of next-generation, battery-less wildlife monitoring platforms using Riotee, an open-source platform purpose-built for intermittent computing. Riotee integrates energy harvesting with a powerful Cortex-M4 MCU and full SDK for managing state-saving, redundancy, and graceful resume from power failures.
[…273 words]Autoscaling geospatial computation with Python and Yirgacheffe / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. Geo-spatial workloads -- working on global maps at metre-level resolutions -- can easily exceed the resources available on a given host when run using conventional schedulers.
To that end, we've been building Yirgacheffe, a geospatial library for Python that attempts to both hide the tedious parts of geospatial work (aligning different data sources for instance), but also tackling the resource management issues so that ecologists don't have to also become computer scientists to scale their work. Yirgacheffe can:
- chunk data in memory automatically, to avoid common issues around memory overcommitment
- can do limited forms of parallelism to use multiple cores.
Yirgacheffe has been deployed in multiple geospatial pipelines, underpinning work like Mapping LIFE on Earth, as well as an implementation of the IUCN STAR metric, and a methodology for assessing tropical forest interventions.
[…453 words]An access library for the world crop, food production and consumption datasets / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. To make informed decisions, it's crucial to understand the biodiversity impacts of various foods, their origins, and potential mitigation strategies. Insights can drive actions from national policies to individual dietary choices. Key factors include knowing where crops are grown, their yields, and food sourcing by country.
The FAOSTAT trade data offers comprehensive import and export records since 1986, but its raw form is complex, including double counting, hindering the link between production and consumption.
[…372 words]3D printing the planet (or bits of it) / Apr 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. But sometimes, you just want to be able to see or touch an area to understand it properly: the flat 2D-projection on a screen doesnt necessarily reveal the subtle geography of a landscape, and data locked into a computer feels less immediate than even a physical model of the same area.
In recent work, Michael Dales has experimented with making 3D-printed models of surface terrain to make some areas of study more relatable. By combining high resolution Digital Elevation Maps (DEMs), and CAD software we were able to scale and print this section of a Swedish forest used to observe Moose migrations.
A hardware description language using OCaml effects / Mar 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. OCaml has the HardCaml ecosystem to express hardware designs in OCaml, make generic designs using the power of the language, then simulate designs and convert them to Verilog or VHDL.
HardCaml is very successfully used in production at places like Jane Street, but needs quite a lot of prerequisite knowledge about the full OCaml language. In particular, it makes very heavy use of the module system in order to build up the circuit description as an OCaml data structure.
Instead of building up a circuit as the output of the OCaml program, it would be very cool if we could directly implement the circuit as OCaml code by evaluating it. This is an approach that works very successfully in the Clash Haskell HDL, as described in this thesis. Clash uses a number of advanced Haskell type-level features to encode fixed-length vectors (very convenient for hardware description) and has an interactive REPL that allows for exploration without requiring a separate test bench.
[…296 words]Using computational SSDs for vector databases / Feb 2025
This is an idea proposed 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. ANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbour) search on these embeddings is used heavily already in RAG systems for LLMs or search-by-example for satellite imagery.
Right now, most ANN databases almost exclusively use memory-resident indexes to accelerate this searching. This is a showstopper for larger datasets, such as the terabytes of PDFs we have for our big evidence synthesis project, each of which generates dozens of embeddings. For global satellite datasets for remote sensing of nature at 10m scale this is easily petabytes per year (the raw data here would need to come from tape drives).
[…398 words]Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry / Feb 2025
This is an idea proposed 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.
Insects dominate animal biodiversity and are sometimes called "the little things that run the world". They play a disproportionate role in ecosystem functioning, are highly sensitive to environmental change and often considered to be early indicators of responses in other taxa. There is widespread concern about global insect declines[^1] yet the evidence behind such declines is highly biassed towards the Global North and much is drawn from short-term biodiversity datasets[^2] [^3].
The Insect Collection at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge holds over 1.2 million specimens. These include specimens collected from the early 19th century to the present day. Most specimens remain undocumented and unavailable for analysis. However, they contain data that are critical to understanding long-term species and community responses to anthropogenic change, and vital to evaluating whether short-term declines are representative of longer-term trends[^4] [^5]. As such, unlocking these insect collections is of paramount importance, and the large-scale nature of these collections necessitates the development of an efficient and effective digitisation process.
The 3D digitisation of specimens using current methods is either highly time-intensive or expensive, rendering it impossible to achieve across the collection in a reasonable time-frame. Yet, 3D models of specimens have huge potential for investigating species morphological responses to anthropogenic changes over time and identification of trade-offs in morphological responses within a 3D morphospace.
[…540 words]Parallel traversal effect handlers for OCaml / Sep 2024
This is an idea proposed as a Cambridge Computer Science Part II project, and has been completed by Sky Batchelor. It was co-supervised with Patrick Ferris.
Most existing uses of effect handlers perform synchronous execution of handled
effects. Xie et al proposed a traverse handler for parallelisation of
independent effectful computations whose effect handlers are outside the
parallel part of the program. The paper [^1] gives a sample implementation as a
Haskell library with an associated λp calculus that formalises the parallel
handlers.
Gradually debugging type errors / Sep 2024
This is an idea proposed as a Cambridge Computer Science Part II project, and is currently being worked on by Max Carroll. It is co-supervised with Patrick Ferris.
Reasoning about type errors is very difficult, and requires shifting between static and dynamic types. In OCaml, the type checker asserts ill-typedness but provides little in the way of understanding why the type checker inferred such types. These direct error messages are difficult to understand even for experienced programmers working on larger codebases.
This project will explore how to use gradual types to reason more effectively about such ill-typed programs, by introducing more dynamic types to help some users build an intuition about the problem in their code. The intention is to enable a more exploratory approach to constructing well-typed programs.
[…131 words]Using wasm to locally explore geospatial layers / Aug 2024
This is an idea proposed as a Cambridge Computer Science Part II project, and is currently being worked on by Sam Forbes. It is co-supervised with Michael Dales.
Some of my projects like Mapping LIFE on Earth or Remote Sensing of Nature involve geospatial base maps with gigabytes or even terabytes of data. This data is usually split up into multiple GeoTIFFs, each of which has a slice of information. For example, the LIFE persistence maps have around 30000 maps for individual species, and then an aggregated GeoTIFF for mammals, birds, reptiles and so forth.
This project will explore how to build a WebAssembly-based visualisation tool for geospatial ecology data. This existing data is in the form of GeoTIFF files, which are image files with embedded georeferencing information. The application will be applied to files which include information on the prevalence of species in an area, consisting of a global map at 100 m2 scale. An existing tool, QGIS, allows ecologists to visualise this data across the entire world, collated by types of species, but this is difficult to work with because of the scale of the data involved.
[…341 words]Towards reproducible URLs with provenance / Aug 2024
This is an idea proposed as a Cambridge Computer Science Part II project, and has expired. It may be co-supervised with Patrick Ferris.
Vurls are an attempt to add versioning to URI resolution. For example, what should happen when we request https://doi.org/10.1109/SASOW.2012.14 and how do we track the chain of events that leads to an answer coming back? The prototype vurl library written in OCaml outputs the following:
Real-time mapping of changes in species extinction risks / Aug 2024
This is an idea proposed as a Cambridge Computer Science PhD topic, and is currently being worked on by Emilio Luz-Ricca. It is co-supervised with Andrew Balmford.
Loss of habitat represents the most significant threat to wildlife overall, but advances in satellite sensing have enabled the assessment of habitat extent with comprehensive spatial coverage and reasonable temporal resolution. To address rising demand for metrics to quantify biodiversity, we have developed the LIFE metric (see Mapping LIFE on Earth) that models the effect of landuse changes on species extinction risk as a function of Areas of Habitat (AoH).
This PhD work explores how to deal with the anthropogenic threats beyond simple habitat loss, including hunting, agricultural practices, and the introduction of invasive species. These additional threatening processes degrade habitat quality and lower species occupancy, but are extremely difficult to observe directly via remote sensing. This project will therefore involve a combination of modelling, machine learning and remote sensing data analysis to understand the impact of these additional anthropogenic threats on habitat quality on a per-species basis.
Mapping hunting risks for wild meat in protected areas / Aug 2024
This is an idea proposed as a postdoctoral project, and is currently being worked on by Charles Emogor. It is co-supervised with Milind Tambe.
There is an important balance needed between the biodiversity damage caused by hunting in protected areas and the well-being of local communities that depend on it. One understudied driver of overly damaging hunting in these areas is snaring (as opposed to gun hunting) which potentially increases carcass wastage and hence causing biodiversity harm without proportionate benefit to the community.
This project examines how to improve the efficacy of anti-poaching ranger patrols while also plugging the knowledge gap around wild meat snaring. Both of these research topics can be tackled in a new light with the emergence of machine learning as a data-driven approach to deriving insights from sparse data, and particularly from some of the newer base maps being developed in our Mapping LIFE on Earth project.
Implementing a higher-order choreographic language / Aug 2024
This is an idea proposed as a Cambridge Computer Science Part II project, and has been completed by Rokas Urbonas. It was co-supervised with Dmirtij Szamozvancev.
This project aims to implement a functional choreographic language inspired by the Pirouette calculus. This language was meant to make the notoriously difficult process of implementing distributed algorithms easier, while offering a practical execution model for multi-participant programs. Additionally, it aimed to match the expressiveness and performance of similar existing solutions.
The project completed very successfully, and resulted in ChorCaml, an embedded DSL for choreographic programming in OCaml. The language facilitates the implementation of distributed algorithms, while offering a clear syntax and safety via the type system. ChorCaml also improves upon existing alternatives in certain common use cases, both in terms of program conciseness and performance. The practicality of the DSL was verified by successfully implementing well-known distributed algortihms such as Diffie-Hellman key exchange and concurrent Karatsuba fast integer multiplication.
[…163 words]Displaying the 25 most recent news items out of 76 in total (see all the items)