A blistering heatweave threw everything off this week; we even had a big power cut through central Cambridge that drove many of us to seek haven in gelato shops.
While melting, I spoke at CHIA's annual conference in the Cambridge Union on AI for Science, and also wrote up the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum London notes, the first such gathering outside the US. Plus the usual fun links at the end.
1 Speaking at the annual CHIA conference
I gave a talk in the Cambridge Union for the CHIA annual conference about "AI for a changing world". I spoke there on TESSERA and our work on using it to find biodiversity worldwide. Afterwards, there was a panel hosted by Ramit Debnath about what young scientists need to consider with the advent of AI in the field.
On a similar note, I was delighted to see the happy faces of our Pembroke undergraduates upon finishing their exams. They've all worked really hard this year and I'm delighted for them irrespective of whatever the results say! I did run into Emily, Shrey and Sophie at 6am when I was out for my morning jog and they were just returning from St John's May Ball...
2 Cloud Native Geospatial Forum
I wrote up notes from the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum, the first such gathering outside the US, held in the Jellicoe during London Climate Action Week. It was a cracking collection of 50 practitioners geeking out over geospatial coordinate systems and Zarr access patterns and that sort of thing. My favourite talk was the Barrios Visibles work that surfaced 3.4 million people missing from Argentina's official record of informal settlements! The overall theme that came up repeatedly was provenance and trust, which aligned with last week's PROPL discussions too.
After the event was done, Isaac Corley is helping me out with a transfer to the Source Coop of the TESSERA embeddings. This will, I hope, solve a big headache we have with distributing the growing number and variations of the core model. We've been working on the v2 release which will be even more data (and excitement) when out soon!
3 Hacking on Eio
I continued to port code over to Eio from my internal trees, most notably with a nice HTTP client capability. I haven't quite had a chance to finish this up well enough to publish yet, but will do so when back from holiday in a few weeks. I've also made progress on Eio Windows, but got a bit stuck with getting in a rabbit hole with IORing and RIO. I've decided to stick to IOCP for the first refresh and save the fancy ring stuff for later on.
Meanwhile, Thomas Leonard kindly reviewed and merged my longstanding Eio sockopts PR and I also debugged FreeBSD ptys for that feature to add pty support into Eio processes directly.
4 Fun Links
- This week's Signals and Threads is on Building a Data Warehouse from Scratch and had the neat tidbit that JS builds databases with temporarily kill switches built in so they don't lose control of the on/off at any time. This is kind of different from the usual 'distribute and stay alive at any cost' that Kubernetes encourages...
- I enjoyed the Last Call on Amol Rajan's podcast, with the sad fact that 2 pubs are closing every day (!) in the UK now. Apparently in some places, a pint (about six quid) only returns a 2% margin to the pub after costs are taken into account, so it's no surprise they're not viable right now.
- Our book club went through The Player of Games this time. It was really fun re-reading it after many years, and I've always been a bit surprised more Iain M Banks books aren't picked up for a TV or film adaptation. This one is particularly perfect, especially when they go to the fire world towards the end!
I'm on vacation for the next couple of weeks heading up to the deep north to find some arctic foxes. Stay cool everyone!