2nd Programming for the Planet workshop CFP out / Apr 2025
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. Read the call for papers here (deadline 3rd July 2025). […565 words]
notesUsing 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]
ideasBattery-free wildlife monitoring with Riotee / 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 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]
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 available for being worked on. It may be 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.
New preprint on benchmarking ultra-low power neural accelerators / Mar 2025
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. Josh found a huge number of interesting NPUs in modern low-cost chips, ranging from ESP32-based boards over to ARM ones. All of these have quite a variety of tradeoffs, from the operations supported (which affects which models can be run on them) to the amount of memory and CPU power.
Benchmarking Ultra-Low-Power µNPUs
Josh Millar, Yushan Huang, Sarab Sethi, Hamed Haddadi and Anil Madhavapeddy.
Working paper at arXiv.
papersLIFE becomes an Official Statistic of the UK government / Mar 2025
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. […629 words]
A fully AI-generated paper just passed peer review; notes from our evidence synthesis workshop / Mar 2025
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. We held a workshop on this topic of AI and evidence synthesis at Pembroke College last week, to understand both the opportunities for the use of AI here, the strengths and limitations of current tools, areas of progress and also just to chat with policymakers from DSIT and thinktanks about how to approach this rapidly moving area. […1565 words]
A trio of papers I read on biodiversity and forests this week / Feb 2025
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! […793 words]
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]
Disentangling carbon credits and offsets with contributions / Feb 2025
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. (Update 7th Feb: I've revised this several times after many discussions this week, especially with David A Coomes and Srinivasan Keshav, with full list of credits in the end) […3552 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 and Arissa-Elena Rotunjanu. 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]
Position paper on scientifically credible carbon credits (via 4C) / Jan 2025
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.
- establishing common standards for carbon quantification and accounting, to cover additionality, leakage and permanence.
- avoiding perverse incentives and align the motivations of all stakeholders with high-integrity outcomes. [...]
- issuing all carbon credits based on trusted primary observations.
- making all the data needed to reproduce carbon calculations available in standard file formats.
- [...] reporting social and biodiversity dimensions of projects separately from carbon calculations.
- integrating DMRV methods into carbon and biodiversity accounting standards to reduce the financial and administrative burdens on nature-based projects and the local communities participating in or affected by them. […186 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).
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