Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing  

Humans are the ones that will save nature, helped by AI / May 2025

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.   […537 words]

The Cambridge "Green Blue" competition to reduce emissions / May 2025

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!

Carl argues that a climate system ultimately only responds to collective actions, and without a global cooperative incentive each nation will spring back to their own isolated short-term incentives that lead to an increase in fossil fuel burning. He has just published the "Themis Mechanism" as a simple alternative for equitable global emission reduction (long form). (6th May 2025: See a new article on Themis as well)

This got me brainstorming with Carl about how to test his theories out and we came up with an idea that is either terrible or awesome; please read on and judge appropriately. I think we should take advantage of Cambridge's unique structure to trial the Themis mechanism via a new competitive decarbonisation sporting league among Colleges that I dub the "Cambridge Green Blue". Given the Chancellor's recent unveiling of an innovation corridor between Oxford and Cambridge, the timing could not be better for an initiative like this. (TL;DR sign up at the bottom of this post if you'd like to participate)   […4038 words]

Using Komodo to manage Docker compose on a small cluster / May 2025

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. It has a mode where it can take existing Docker compose files on a given host, and run them, and provide a web-based monitor to keep an eye on a few machines.   […629 words]

BIOMASS launches to measure forest carbon flux from space / May 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.

Weirdly, the whole thing almost never happened because permission to use the P-band was blocked because it might interfere with US nuclear missile warning radars back in 2013.

Meeting in Graz, Austria, to select the the 7th Earth Explorer mission to be flown by the 20-nation European Space Agency (ESA), backers of the Biomass mission were pelted with questions about how badly the U.S. network of missile warning and space-tracking radars in North America, Greenland and Europe would undermine Biomass’ global carbon-monitoring objectives.

Europe's Earth observation satellite system may be the world's most dynamic, but as it pushes its operating envelope into new areas, it is learning a lesson long ago taught to satellite telecommunications operators: Radio frequency is scarce, and once users have a piece of it they hold fast. -- Spacenews (2013)

Luckily, all this got sorted by international frequency negotiators, and after being built by Airbus in Stevenage (and Germany and France, as it's a complex instrument!) it took off without a hitch. Looking forward to getting my hands on the first results later in the year over at the Centre for Earth Observation.

Check out this cool ESA video about the instrument to learn more, and congratulations to the team at ESA. Looking forward to the next BIOSPACE where there will no doubt be initial buzz about this.

Technology needs to unite conservation, not divide it / Apr 2025

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. Since then, there's been a lot of corridor conversations about future projects (and even dinner with the Wildlife Trusts). However, there has also been discussion about the potential harms of our work, most notably in a response letter to our paper written by Katie Murray and colleagues.

Murray et al make two really important points:

• [...] importance of ecological expertise must be recognised as much more than just the expert annotation of training data
• [...] effort should be made to build capacity for AI development in the Global South, so that the rewards of successful research can be shared -- The potential for AI to divide conservation   […1481 words]

Viewing web logs the old fashioned way with Goaccess / Apr 2025

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. Then Nick Ludlam pointed me to an old-fashioned server-side log analyser with builtin privacy called Goaccess he's using on his site, which is also perfect for my needs!   […426 words]

Talks from LOCO24 are now available online / Apr 2025

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. The keynote from Anne Currie was fantastic and wide-ranging (she is the author of the eerily predictive Panopticon series):

Webassembly on exotic architectures (a 2025 roundup) / Apr 2025

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. It turns out that there are very fun systems projects going on to turn wasm into a "real" target architecture on several fronts: a native port of Linux to run in wasm, a port of wasm to run in kernel space, a POSIX mapping of wasm, and fledgling wasm-CPUs-on-FPGAs.   […1130 words]

ESA's first BioSpace conference seems a huge success / Apr 2025

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. I've only just gotten around to fully browsing the schedule, and it's incredible to see so much variety of work happening in biodiversity and remote sensing. Here's hoping that ESA makes this an annual event in Italy!   […793 words]

Unikernels wins the ASPLOS most influential paper award / Apr 2025

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!   […1524 words]

Semi distributed filesystems with ZFS and Sanoid / Apr 2025

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. This is rapidly becoming a bottleneck as our group and datasets grow, and Mark Elvers has been steadily adding lots more raw capacity. The question now is how to configure this raw SSD capacity into a more nimble storage setup. If anyone's seen any systems similar to the one sketched out below, I'd love to hear from you.   […1676 words]

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]

LIFE 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]

Socially self-hosting source code with Tangled on Bluesky / Mar 2025

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. This experimentation also has a more serious undertone due to the increasing need for data sovereignty and so I'm starting to move my source code to self-hosted solutions that are less reliant on centralised services.

This has also come up persistently over the years in the OCaml community, with questions over why participation in packaging requires a GitHub account ever since the early days of opam. I've never found a good answer... until now, with the launch of an exciting new service that's built over the same protocol that Bluesky uses. As I noted a few weeks ago, the ATProto can be used for more than just microblogging. It can also be an identity layer, across which other applications can be built which reuse the social fabric from Bluesky accounts.

"Tangled" is a new service launched (just yesterday!) by @opilli and @icyphox to manage Git repositories. I'm having a lot of fun trying it out, even in its early alpha stages! The coolest thing about Tangled is that you can self-host your own knots, which control where the source code repositories are actually stored.   […1104 words]