Anil Madhavapeddy

EEG internships for the summer of 2025 / Jun 2025 / DOI

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!

Who we all are this summer

We're working on quite the diversity of projects this summer, ranging from classic computer systems and programming problems all the way through to environmental science. Here's a recap of what's going on.

First we're working against the evidence database we've been building for the past couple of years:

• "Evaluating a human-in-the-loop AI framework to improve inclusion criteria for evidence synthesis" with Radhika Agrawal, supervised by Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer
• "Accurate summarisation of threats for conservation evidence literature" with Kittson Hamill, supervised by Sadiq Jaffer following up her successful MPhil submission.

We're then heading into remote sensing and working on some mapping projects:

• "Habitat mapping of the Cairngormes Connect restoration area" with Isabel Mansley, supervised by David Coomes and Aland Chan
• "Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs" with Gabriel Mahler, supervised by Silviu Petrovan, as well as writing up his MPhil dissertation on "Enhancing Navigation Algorithms with Semantic Embeddings"
• "Validating predictions with ranger insights to enhance anti-poaching patrol strategies in protected areas" with Hannah McLoone, supervised by Charles Emogor and Rob Fletcher

Dropping down towards embedded systems and fun "real-world" projects, we have:

• "Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry" with Beatrice Spence, Anna Yiu and Arissa-Elena Rotunjanu, supervised by Tiffany Ki and Edgar Turner
• "3D printing the planet (or bits of it)" with Finley Stirk, supervised by Michael Dales
• "Low power audio transcription with Whisper" with Dan Kvit and "Battery-free wildlife monitoring with Riotee" with Dominico Parish, both supervised by Josh Millar

Going back to classic computer science, we have a few programming language and systems projects:

• "Bidirectional Hazel to OCaml programming" with Max Carroll, supervised by Patrick Ferris and Cyrus Omar
• "Effects based scheduling for the OCaml compiler pipeline" with Lucas Ma and "Runtimes à la carte: crossloading native and bytecode OCaml" with Jeremy Chen, both supervised by David Allsopp
• "ZFS replication strategies with encryption" with Becky Terefe-Zenebe, supervised by Mark Elvers

Ground rules

Since there are so many of us this summer, it's imperative that you're all proactive about communicating any problems or clarifications you need. If something here doesn't make sense, or you have a better idea, then just reach out to any of the supervisors or me directly!

Do also take time to learn from each other. Read up on not just your own project in the list above, but take some to read the remainder so that you have a sense of what everyone is working on. When you see each other, it'll be much easier to chat about what's going on and find opportunities for commonality.

The projects above have been carefully selected to not be on the critical path for any deadlines. If it's not going well from your perspective, then it's ok to take a step back and figure out why! We're hear to learn and discover things, so take the time to do so.

Where we will work

This will be different for everyone, since it depends on which home department will house the project. Some of us will be in the David Attenborough Building, in the third floor where the CRI is:

• Radhika Agrawal and Kittson Hamill will be with the CE crew near Bill Sutherland's office
• Isabel Mansley and Gabriel Mahler will hang out with David Coomes's group
• Hannah McLoone can work near Rob Fletcher's office where Charles Emogor works

Those working on the Zoology Museum itself (Arissa-Elena Rotunjanu, Beatrice Spence and Anna Yiu) will have an health and safety induction on Monday with Tiffany Ki and find offices there.

The rest of us will be in the Computer Lab over in West Cambridge:

• Lucas Ma and Jeremy Chen will work out of FW15 with David Allsopp and Jon Ludlam
• Dan Kvit, Finley Stirk, Becky Terefe-Zenebe and Dominico Parish will be in FW15/14. We may need to clear out one desk in FW15 to make room here (just put the stuff in my office in FW16). Michael Dales and Sadiq Jaffer will work out of my office (FW16) for the summer, and Onkar Gulati is away for an internship in the USA.
• We'll find somewhere for Max Carroll either in West Cambridge or in Pembroke soon, depending on preferences and heat!

It'll probably take a week to let this all shake out, so please do shout if you find yourself stuck in your room and without an office! You should of course arrange to meet your immediate supervisors regularly according to whatever schedule and location works for you.

How you will get paid

The way you get paid weekly is via the Cambridge Casual Worker system. This has a few important steps that you must pay attention to, or you will not get paid!

• Before starting work you must go find Alicja Zavros in the Computer Lab with your passport or other proof of your right to work in the UK. I've told Alicja that may of you will show up on Monday 30th June morning. It won't take more than a few minutes, as she'll take a photocopy of your id. You should also have registered on the CCWS and gotten a login.
• Every Friday that you do some work, fill in a timesheet on the CCWS. Round this off to a full day (8 hours) and don't do fine-grained timekeeping; just the number of days you've worked is fine. If you don't fill in a timesheet promptly, you won't get paid.
• You must keep a research log with weeknotes that record what you've been up to. The exact style of weeknotes are entirely up to you, but it's vital that you get in the habit of keeping a log. If you have your own homepage, then send an Atom feed to me. If you don't, then we have a github/ucam-eo/interns-2025 which I can give you write access to. It's typical to store your weeknotes in Markdown format, and just a simple subdirectory with a date-based convention is fine. The primary use of weeknotes is to highlight things you've accomplished, areas where you are blocked, and interesting things you have run across. Try to make it a record to your future self, and also a way to let those around you know what's going on. While missing the occasional weeknote is just fine, missing them all will be a problem, so plan your time accordingly. Weeknotes are also not a mechanism to assess anything to do with your progress, but a simple form of communication.

Registering on chat channels

Since we're all going to spread around Cambridge physically, it's important to have a chat channel. Hannah McLoone is setting up a WhatsApp group for social things (see below), but we also use Matrix as our "hackers choice" for day-to-day messaging.

We host a Computer Lab Matrix server on which anyone with a valid Raven account can create an account. Since Matrix is a decentralised chat system, it is also possible to use other accounts from third-party servers, and also to join channels elsewhere.

To create an account:

• In your Matrix client (we most commonly use Element), select eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk as your homeserver.
• Login with SSO (Single Sign On)
• You should see a Cambridge authentication screen for your CRSID.

Once you create your account, you will be in the "EEG" Matrix space. A Matrix space is a collection of channels, and you should join "EEGeneral" as the overall channel for the group. We'll create a separate room just for intern chats. We also have a bot in the room that posts our blogs to the channel, so you can keep up with what the group members are all chattering about. Ryan Gibb runs the CL matrix server, and there are occasional quirks, so just let us know if you run into any problems. I am @avsm:recoil.org on there, not avsm2 as I use my personal Matrix for a bunch of stuff.

Summer social activities

It's important to get some downtime this summer and recharge. Hannah McLoone has been setting up a social group for the interns to hang out together, and we'll organise a punting excursion at some point to get us out to the river. Of course, many of us will be travelling this summer (I'm heading off to Botswana in late July for instance), so please do also make suggestions.