Updated preprint on quantifying biodiversity cost of food consumption / Feb 2025
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. […196 words]
Updated preprint on LLMs for evidence-based decision support / Jan 2025
We have just updated our preprint on using LLMs for evidence decision support with more evaluation results and corrections from peer review.
Our findings suggest that, with careful domain-specific design, LLMs could potentially be powerful tools for enabling expert-level use of evidence syntheses and databases. However, general LLMs used "out-of-the-box" are likely to perform poorly and misinform decision-makers. By establishing that LLMs exhibit comparable performance with human synthesis experts on providing restricted responses to queries of evidence syntheses and databases, future work can build on our approach to quantify LLM performance in providing open-ended responses.
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.
Radhika Iyer, Alec Christie, Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Bill Sutherland and Sadiq Jaffer.
Working paper at Research Square.
LIFE metric published in Royal Society Phil Trans B / Jan 2025
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. And that's what LIFE provides: a way to compare the relative impacts of some landuse anywhere in the world, in a manner that is globally applicable. […409 words]
LIFE: A metric for mapping the impact of land-cover change on global extinctions
Alison Eyres, Thomas Ball, Michael Dales, Thomas Swinfield, Andy Arnell, Daniele Baisero, América Paz Durán, Jonathan Green, Rhys Green, Anil Madhavapeddy and Andrew Balmford.
Journal paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (vol 380 issue 1917).
Horizon scan on AI and conservation published / Dec 2024
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.
The first horizon scan resulting from this has just been published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. If you're looking for a gentle introduction to some of the terms in AI from a non-experts perspective, the first section does a good job of defining a glossary as well. […118 words]
The potential for AI to revolutionize conservation: a horizon scan
Sam Reynolds, Sara Beery, Neil Burgess, Mark Burgman, Stuart Butchart, Steven J. Cooke, David A Coomes, Finn Danielsen, Enrico Di Minin, América Paz Durán, Francis Gassert, Amy Hinsley, Sadiq Jaffer, Julia P.G. Jones, Binbin V. Li, Oisin Mac Aodha, Anil Madhavapeddy, Stephanie O'Donnell, Bill Oxbury, Lloyd Peck, Nathalie Pettorelli, Jon Paul Rodríguez, Emily Shuckburgh, Bernardo Strassburg, Hiromi Yamashita, Zhongqi Miao and Bill Sutherland.
Journal paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
Towards verifiable, privacy-preserving carbon emissions claims / Dec 2024
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. There's a lot of muddled data out there, and calculating accurate carbon emissions across a computing pipeline involves a number of stakeholders, none of whom are incentivised to accurately report their emissions for competitive reasons!
In this LOCO paper, Jessica Man lead our exploration of mechanisms to support verifiable and privacy-preserving emissions reporting across a chain of energy suppliers, cloud data centres, virtual machine hosting services providers and cloud services providers. The idea is that all of this can ultimately be exposed to APIs that can be consumed by client devices in order to let consumers make direct choices about their decisions based on relative environmental impacts.
Towards a frugal userspace for Linux / Dec 2024
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. So then, when the LOCO conference came around, we wrote up our thoughts on what a frugal Linux userspace might look like.
The key insight is that the Linux kernel already exposes a number of namespace mechanisms (that we use in Docker, for example), and so we explore a new OS architecture which defaults to deterministic, reusable computation with the careful recording of side-effects. This in turn allows Linux to guide complex computations towards previously acquired intermediate results, but still allowing for recomputation when required by the user. We're putting this together into a new shell known as "Shark", and this first abstract describes our early results.
Prototyping carbon-aware domain name resolution / Dec 2024
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. A next step was then to build a custom DNS server written in OCaml to actively wake machines running networked services as a side effect of the name resolution.
Extending DNS means that we maintain compatibility with existing Internet infrastructure, unlocking the ability for existing applications to be carbon-aware. This is very much a spiritual follow on to the Signposts project that I worked on back in 2013, and have always wanted to return to!
Ryan Gibb, Patrick Ferris and Anil Madhavapeddy.
Abstract in the 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing.
Cooperative Sensor Networks for Long-Term Biodiversity Monitoring / Dec 2024
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.
Published a legal perspective on high integrity forest carbon credits / Nov 2024
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 rights.
The resulting paper has just been published in the Climate and Carbon Law Review journal, and is available as open access for your perusal.
A Legal Perspective on Supply-side Integrity Issues in the Forest Carbon Market
Sophie Chapman, Eleanor Toye Scott, Thomas Swinfield, Robin Daniels and Anil Madhavapeddy.
Journal paper in Carbon & Climate Law Review (vol 18 issue 3).
Presented poster at Sensys on low-power biodiversity monitoring / Nov 2024
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. […140 words]
Preprint on using LLMs to for evidence-based decision support / Nov 2024
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!
Radhika Iyer, Alec Christie, Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Bill Sutherland and Sadiq Jaffer.
Working paper at Research Square.
Paper on scheduling for reduced tail task latencies / Nov 2024
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. […71 words]
Towards security specifications for agentic AIs / Sep 2024
A very fun talk at ACM HOPE 2024 on some new work with Cyrus Omar and Patrick Ferris on how we can formally specify systems to be robust to code generation by AI agents. For instance, if you were to ask GitHub Copilot to generate you code to filter endangered animals out of a folder of images, it might interpret that as to delete the image, or to move it to another folder (which might be public), or just remove it from the index. Any of those options are potentially valid, so what do we do? Our idea is to use F* to specify a rich set of allowable behaviours which can then be dynamically enforced in less expressive languages, and thus offer layers of protection against over-eager (or rogue) AI agents. […183 words]
Paper published on ex-ante forecasts of nature-based solutions / Aug 2024
Our paper on ex-ante projection for nature-based solutions has been published in the Journal of Carbon Management. I also wrote up some long-form thoughts on it here.
E.-Ping Rau, James Gross, David A Coomes, Thomas Swinfield, Anil Madhavapeddy, Andrew Balmford and Srinivasan Keshav.
Journal paper in Carbon Management (vol 15 issue 1).
PACT Tropical Moist Forest Accreditation Methodology / Aug 2024
We have just released the Tropical Moist Forest v2.1 specification, to follow up the now-expired v2.0 from six months ago. The key updates are a new high-level explainer, as well as clarifiations for buffer zones and base tiles.
PACT Tropical Moist Forest Accreditation Methodology v2.1
Andrew Balmford, David A Coomes, Michael Dales, Patrick Ferris, James Hartup, Sadiq Jaffer, Srinivasan Keshav, Miranda Lam, Anil Madhavapeddy, Robin Message, E.-Ping Rau, Thomas Swinfield, Charlotte Wheeler and Abby Williams.
Working paper at Cambridge Open Engage.
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