Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing

Is AI poisoning the scientific literature? Our comment in Nature / Jul 2025

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. We have just published a comment in Nature about the next phase of our research, where are looking into the impact of AI advances on evidence synthesis.

EEG internships for the summer of 2025 / Jun 2025

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. If you're an intern, then I highly recommend you take the time to carefully read through all of this, starting with who we are, some ground rules, where we will work, how we chat, how to get paid, and of course social activities to make sure we have some fun!

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

Update 28th June 2025: See also this beautiful BBC article about the satellite, via David Coomes.

Under the hood with Apple's new Containerization framework / Jun 2025

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.

There were two separate things announced: a Containerization framework and also a container CLI tool that aims to be an OCI compliant tool to manipulate and execute container images. The former is a general-purpose framework that could be used by Docker, but it wasn't clear to me where the new CLI tool fits in among the existing layers of runc, containerd and of course Docker itself. The only way to find out is to take the new release for a spin, since Apple open-sourced everything (well done!).

Visiting National Geographic HQ and the Urban Exploration Project / Jun 2025

I stayed on for a few days extra in Washington DC after the biodiversity extravaganza to attend a workshop at legendary National Geographic Basecamp. While I've been to several NatGeo Explorers meetups in California, I've never had the chance to visit their HQ. The purpose of this was to attend a workshop organised by Christian Rutz from St Andrews about the "Urban Exploration Project":

[The UEP is a...] global-scale, community-driven initiative will collaboratively track animals across gradients of urbanization worldwide, to produce a holistic understanding of animal behaviour in human-modified landscapes that can, in turn, be used to develop evidence-based approaches to achieving sustainable human-wildlife coexistence. -- Christian Rutz's homepage

This immediately grabbed my interest, since it's a very different angle of biodiversity measurements to my usual. I've so far been mainly involved in efforts that use remote sensing or expert range maps, but the UEP program is more concerned with the dynamic movements of species. Wildlife movements are extremely relevant to conservation efforts since there is a large tension between human/wildlife coexistence in areas where both communities are under spatial pressure. Tom Ratsakatika for example did his AI4ER project on the tensions in the Romanian Carpathian mountains, and elephant/human conflicts and tiger/human conflicts are also well known.

What I learnt at the National Academy of Sciences US-UK Forum on Biodiversity / Jun 2025

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:

Assessing biodiversity is fundamental to understanding the distribution of biodiversity, the changes that are occurring and, crucially, the effectiveness of actions to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Such assessments face multiple challenges, not least the great complexity of natural systems, but also a lack of standardized approaches to measurement, a plethora of measurement technologies with their own strengths and weaknesses, and different data needs depending on the purpose for which the information is being gathered.

Other sectors have faced similar challenges, and the forum will look to learn from these precedents with a view to building momentum toward standardized methods for using environmental monitoring technologies, including new technologies, for particular purposes. -- NAS/Royal Society US-UK Scientific Forum on Measuring Biodiversity

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. But before that, here's some of the bigger picture stuff I learnt...

We become Junior Rangers at Shenandoah / May 2025

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.

The National Park Service in the US runs a wonderful program for anyone aged 8+ (which we just about qualified for) to introduce people to nature, and Shenandoah is no exception. We visited the local ranger lodge in the park, and picked up a program booklet. They're full of activities for kids to do, but of course adults also pick up a lot of random knowledge (such as the endemic salamander species in the region).

Learnings from the Cambridge Environmental Sustainability Committee / May 2025

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.

Sally Pidgeon, our wonderful head of Enviromental Sustainaibility, has been redeveloping the public website and has put a lot of interesting data online. There is now a new Environmental Sustainability website that tracks the University committment structure more closely, with the areas broken up into Carbon & Energy, Travel & Transport, Waste & Circular Economy, Biodiversity, and Water usage.

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.

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)

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.

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

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!

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.