Rightmove added the strapline “believe it” to its logo. The reference to what an estate agent tells you is clear (don’t).

Earthquake Prediction Flowchart xkcd.com/3165/

This blogpost by Cal Newport is pretty good: "Forget Chatbots You Need a Notebook". calnewport.com/forget-chatb...

More wonders of the natural world. Now some flowers of the plant in my office appear as if suspended in the void. This looks like a “technique” to invite pollinators. Or maybe it is a self-pollinating plant and these flowers contain seeds (?). 1/2

The Singularity is Not Near.

Continents xkcd.com/3159/

Re the AWS outage, it’s quite cool that the BBC interviewed Ken Birman, who knows a thing or two about distributed systems. 1/2

We received the ACM UbiComp 2025 10-Year Impact Award for our paper “Trajectories of Depression: Unobtrusive Monitoring of Depressive States by means of Smartphone Mobility Traces Analysis” co-authored with the great Luca Canzian. Paper here: www.mircomusolesi.org/papers/ubico... #ubicomp2025

New preprint with Charles Westphal and Stephen Hailes: "A Generalized Information Bottleneck Theory of Deep Learning". In this work, we introduce the Generalized Information Bottleneck framework, a synergy-based reformulation of the Information Bottleneck theory. arxiv.org/abs/2509.26327

Lots of headlines claim graduates are more likely to be unemployed than non-graduates. Graduate unemployment panic makes good headlines, but the data says otherwise. Great analysis by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com. www.ft.com/content/ea9e... .

New preprint: “Complexity-Driven Policy Optimization”. The paper discusses a novel complexity-driven policy optimisation solution for efficient and robust approximation in Reinforcement Learning. Essentially, entropy alone is not sufficient, we also need "structure".

Received a copy of “The Library of Lost Maps” by my colleague James Cheshire at @uclgeography.bsky.social in the internal mail. Really beautiful (and very interesting) book. Thanks a lot James!

For the geeks among you: just discovered the Apple Calculator app has a "Programmer" mode, complete with binary, hex, and related operations.

I was thinking about this some weeks ago. The Travelling Salesman Problem (finding the shortest path through a list of cities, visiting each only once), a classic in Computer Science/Maths, is becoming something of the past without actual salesmen on the roads. 1/2

Wonders of the natural world. I inherited an office cactus from a colleague who left. In a matter of days, out of nothing the cactus has developed a very long stem (with flowers).

Today Charlie Westphal will present our paper "Feature Selection for Network Intrusion Detection" in the main Research Track of ACM KDD 2025 in Toronto. Link to the paper: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... #KDD2025

Dream jobs and where to find them. linkedin.com/jobs/view/42...

If you are attending #RLDM2025 in Dublin this week, do not miss the posters by Liza Tennant (liza-tennant.github.io) and Lorenz Wolf (profiles.ucl.ac.uk/90553-lorenz...) showcasing the work of our lab! rldm.org @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social

Many posts about Apple announcements following WWDC25. I definitely like the glassy widgets. Less attention has been paid to the passing of Bill Atkinson, a real (personal) computer pioneer. This NYT obituary is quite good: www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t... 1/2

8 days left to apply!

The second call for applications to the CDT in Cyber-Physical Risk is now open. I am offering two projects in the area of AI and cybersecurity. I would be happy to chat about this opportunity if you are interested. www.ucl.ac.uk/security-cri... Closing date: 15 June 2025.

Also, presented in the Blue Sky Track, so this seems the right place to advertise it.

Today our paper with James Rudd-Jones and María Pérez-Ortiz "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Simulation for Environmental Policy Synthesis" will be presented at the #AAMAS2025 Conference in Detroit. Time: 2pm ET Room: Richard Link to the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2504.12777 @aamasconf.bsky.social

Congratulations to Liza Tennant (liza-tennant.github.io) for passing her PhD viva today with a thesis on “Moral Alignment of Agentic AI Systems”! Well done Liza! And thanks to the examiners @jzleibo.bsky.social and John Shawe-Taylor for examining Liza’s dissertation.

If you are attending #AISTAT2025, do not miss Charlie's presentation tomorrow.

Our paper "Partial Information Decomposition for Data Interpretability and Feature Selection" with Charlie Westphal and Steve Hailes will be presented at #AISTAT2025 on Sunday. Session details: Spot 151 in Session 2 (Sun, May 4). Link to the paper: openreview.net/attachment?i...

Our paper on model-based reinforcement learning for causal discovery is now out in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. @royalsocietypublishing.org @uclengineering.bsky.social

Having been quite interested in the idea of the Animal-AI Olympics (github.com/Kinds-of-Int...) in the past, I am very happy to see that ICLR is colocated with PetExpo this year. #ICLR2025

This afternoon Liza Tennant will present our paper "Moral Alignment for LLM Agents" at @iclr-conf.bsky.social 2025. Time: 3pm Singapore time Location: Hall 3 + Hall 2B #238 Paper: openreview.net/pdf?id=MeGDm... Poster+video: iclr.cc/virtual/2025... #ICLR2025 #ICLR25

For Mac users: in case you experience problems connecting to your WiFi network after the latest Sequoia update (and your network does Ethernet address authentication), you should check if the private address option has been automatically switched on. support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/...

The CDT PhD studentships application deadline has been extended to 25 April 2025 - still time to apply.

The CDT PhD studentships application deadline has been extended to 25 April 2025 - still time to apply.

There are only five days left to apply for this opportunity if you are interested!

Congratulations to Giorgio Franceschelli (giorgiofranceschelli.github.io) for successfully defending his PhD thesis on Deep Reinforcement Learning and AI creativity!

I miss Weird Sony

'Daisy' comes from the Old English for 'day's eye' as the flowers open during the day and shut again at night.

I am advertising two PhD projects in the area of AI&cybersecurity as part of the new EPSRC CDT in Cyber-Physical Risk at UCL. These are fully-funded PhD studentships starting in September 2025. Information here: ucl.ac.uk/security-cri... Closing date: 15 April 2025.

Our paper with Nayana Dasgupta "Investigating the Impact of Direct Punishment on the Emergence of Cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Systems" is now out in the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. Link to the paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Upgraded to Sequoia (always waiting a bit, well, months before updating the OS). I really like redwood forests, but the startup wallpaper is honestly beautiful.

New paper with Alessandro Staffolani, Victor-Alexandru Darvariu and Paolo Bellavista published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems: "A Cost Aware Adaptive Bike Repositioning Agent Using Deep Reinforcement Learning". Link to the paper: www.mircomusolesi.org/papers/tist2...

This excellent interactive tutorial on misleading data visualizations explores the idea of a "counter chart" — the graph you draw in response to refute a misleading claims flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

Paper with Nayana Dasgupta accepted in the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS): "Investigating the Impact of Direct Punishment on the Emergence of Cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Systems". Preprint available here: arxiv.org/abs/2301.08278

Good article by Marcus du Sautoy on the bad idea of cutting funding for maths. www.ft.com/content/4ed6...

Paper accepted at #AISTAT2025: "Partial Information Decomposition for Data Interpretability and Feature Selection". Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2405.19212 1/3

Our paper on moral alignment for LLM agents has been accepted at #ICLR2025. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2410.01639

I just finished "The Earth Transformed" by Peter Frankopan. An interesting perspective on the role of the environment in human history across different civilisations and the many interdependencies between humans and nature. It is a "dense" book, but I definitely recommend it.

If you have a respiratory tract infection at the moment please contribute! Can AI learn from breath and voice recordings to help predict severe coughs and colds? In England, aged 18+. reloadstudy.co.uk

Our paper with Giorgio Franceschelli "On the creativity of large language models" is now out in AI&Society as open access article. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our paper with Alexei Pisacane and Victor Darvariu "Reinforcement Learning Discovers Efficient Decentralized Graph Path Search Strategies" will be presented today at the Learning on Graphs Conference 2024 (@logconference.bsky.social) at 3pm UK time. #log2024 Paper: openreview.net/pdf?id=trxhr...

Our work Towards Open Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models: Pretraining and Benchmarking is to be presented at Neurips B&D track. Read here about it opera-benchmark.github.io