While my colleagues have been busy with start-of-term matters, I've been enjoying being able to get some research done while on sabbatical! I got back to Cambridge from India and settled back to hacking on my research projects.
1 Vultr and Nvidia
I caught up with the AMD and Vultr team, as they have been sponsoring TESSERA with giving us access to an AMD MI325X 6x node, which has been tremendous help in getting TESSERA embeddings going. Before Christmas, our DAWN access expired and we had literally no GPUs to continue working on TESSERA, so Vultr stepping in at extremely short notice has been an incredible godsend for our plucky geospatial project. The team from Vultr, especially Kasia Hilborne, have been delightfully nice to work with as well!
Following up with the extremely random Jensen Huang chat last year, the nVidia team visited and we also discussed future collaborations around TESSERA. And then I went to the pub with the AMD crew, so this was pretty much full GPU hustling coverage for the week except for the absence of anyone from Intel in my immediate vicinity.
2 Speaking at the AI4Nature launch
I got invited by Sam Reynolds to go speak at the AI4Nature launch down at the IET in London.
Ai4Nature is a cross-sectoral collaborative initiative to advance responsible AI applications in biodiversity data and nature recovery and enhancement, building sustainable global influence through collaborative standards development, education, and knowledge sharing. -- AI4Nature, 2025
I talked about how modern AI initiatives might help, similarly to the red pill and blue pill talk last week at the Conservation Evidence conference. The talk was recorded, but the recording just focussed on me and didn't show my slides, so you'll have to follow along with my slides by hand if you watch it!
You can read a full roundup on the AI4Nature journal along with all the other talks. There were an interesting mix of urban developers, remote sensing experts and conservation ecologists there, all wondering how to balance the delicate mix of nature and human needs. I sent several people there our just-out LIFE recipes paper and others the FOOD biodiversity explorer. Thanks to Sam for the invite to a great event!
3 Picking up Tomas's new PL book
Dominic Orchard and I went along to the CUP bookshop to pick up our PhD buddy Tomas Petricek's latest book on "Cultures of Programming". Although it was closed on first visit, I nipped along later and found the last copy, which I'm now reading with great enjoyment.
Fun links:
- Claude Cowork got released, and it uses a much worse VM than Docker for Desktop so I sent them our ICFP paper on Docker in case they wanted to vibe up a better base image.
- I chatted a bit with Michael Dales about his struggles with buffered file IO on macOS and spelunked deep into macOS libc to discover just how bad the situation is.