ladies and gentlemen...we got him

Our paper OpenLex3D is accepted to NeurIPS! tldr; a new benchmark for open-vocabulary scene understanding methods. Page: openlex3d.github.io Thanks to Sacha Morin, Martin Büchner @mmattamala.bsky.social, @kumaraditya-gupta.bsky.social, Abhinav Valada, Liam Paull & @mauricefallon.bsky.social

The new macOS is stupidly round

Colleagues based at UK universities: please sign and share this letter to support Gazan students coming to study in the UK, in order to request Governmental deferral of the biometric data requirement and safe evacuation.

and a slide that explains illegal data torrenting by Meta, i also had to remove In the end, it was either remove everything that names names (big tech particularly) and remove logos or cancel my talk. 2/

a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes' 1/

'Vacations.' The word is 'vacations.'

I got tired of the nonsense some AI leaders were coming out with, and so I wrote this for @newscientist.com www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

Insane stuff

1/2 Headline wrong: not "first". Robot Soccer has been an international competition for 30+ years. People newly aware of something often think it has just happened now and progress will be fast. See the ten+ year old photo in my second skeet. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Just finished reading this well-researched and well-written piece. From a cursory look at Peter Putnam's papers, it seems that he anticipated ideas like neural Darwinism, enactivism, and Robert Rosen's notion of emergence relative to a model by creation of new observables. www.peterputnam.org

This week I started as a Research Associate (aka Postdoc) at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social. I'll be working with @sramamoorthy.bsky.social in the new Centre for AI for Assistive Autonomy. Let me know if you are around :)

Reminder that the MSCA postdoctoral program exists. If you have a PhD and want to work in a European lab, you have until September to apply. Just contact them now. ec.europa.eu/info/funding...

I wrote an article for The Conversation analysing the robot horse presented by Kawasaki :)

This is very cool work, and reminds me of some of the objectives of the LAGR project. It's also pretty impressive to see robot experiments with different baseline methods in closed loop!

Wholesome stuff

Very cool paper showing that Crows can spot the odd shape out of a set where all other shapes are similar. @scinews.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🐦‍⬛ 🐦‍⬛ 🐦‍⬛ 🐦‍⬛

Here is how I have been comparing the two big hype phenomena in AI and robotics, in my recent talks. Spoiler alert: the hype is unfounded.

Don’t remember where I saw this library flyer a while back but it’s great

It's never too late to repost that the part 2 of the SLAM handbook is out! There are really cool contributions from my colleagues (as well as the leg odometry chapter we wrote with Marco Camurri)

It’s always “We launched these tardigrades into space!” “We froze them to absolute zero!” “We threw them into an erupting volcano!” Never “We took these tardigrades on a holiday. They’re getting tiny massages and sipping little umbrella drinks on the beach.”

“Calling Bullshit” by @carlbergstrom.com and @jevinwest.bsky.social is an awesome book. It’s really fun and enjoyable to read (I really liked the writing style), and it’s full of knowledge everyone should know about.

This is a great Sunday read

Benjamin Mottis is Global Research Community Manager at ANYbotics, where he has been working on expanding the ANYmal Research Community and helping researchers push the boundaries of robotics. Listen to our chat here: www.robottalk.org/2025/03/28/e... #Robots #Robotics #Industry

This is absolutely nuts

“The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs” by @stevebrusatte.bsky.social is a great book. Very educational and entertaining, and a nice tribute to mentors, colleagues, and students in the field.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

“Beyond Measure” by @jjvincent.bsky.social is an awesome book. I highly recommend it. It’s not just about history, but a deeper reflection on all the social implications of the act of measuring.

This week I felt gaslighted by Flying Tiger because this finger puppet is supposedly a sheep(?) (The options are cow, pig, sheep, duck, and frog flyingtiger.com/en-gb/produc...)

Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models. In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.

I'm recruiting a new PhD student on Gaussian Belief Propagation for Spatial AI. For this particular opportunity: 1. The funding I have is only available to a student who qualifies for "home fees" in England; 2. I'm looking for someone who can start soon, ideally April 2025.

Recently talked to a student who admitted to using ChatGPT as a study device - by feeding it all of the class lecture slides and having it generate summaries. So now OpenAI has ownership of all the slides my co-instructor and I created from scratch…

Every Jan 1 I post a scorecard on predictions I made, with dates, on Jan 1, 2018 on cars (self-driving), robots, AI, & ML, and on human spaceflight. Besides telling which turned out right and which wrong in the last year I also talk a lot of smack about these topics. rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...

I keep getting asked about my take on these CO2 estimates for the o3 model by the press and members of the community, so I'll interrupt my vacation to comment 🤓 TL;DR- any kind of estimate is a proxy, and instead of wasting our time and energy, we should demand👏🏼 accountability👏🏼

New evidence shows AI's thirst for power may be distorting the flow of power to US consumers (gift link): www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

I'm putting this out there again because I think what Shannon says about AI is important, so I want folks to see it. nautil.us/ai-is-the-bl...

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky 1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research Open Access journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Do you know any early career researchers in the UK who have contributed something special to improve research practices? The call for the 2025 Dorothy Bishop award is open now! Nominations close on 26 January 2025. www.ukrn.org/2024/12/12/t...

And part 2 is here as I filled the first! go.bsky.app/2wr669L

There is a "Women in AI" pack: bsky.app/start/did:pl... I'd also be happy to be added to your pack. I do ML for Systems research along with bioplausible networks.

Inspired by @wimlds.bsky.social , I looked for a "Women in Machine Learning" starter pack and couldn't find one. So I created one! May have some mistakes. I'll try to do an AI ethics one next. 🤗 go.bsky.app/LT6CwNN

Entropy is one of those formulas that many of us learn, swallow whole, and even use regularly without really understanding. (E.g., where does that “log” come from? Are there other possible formulas?) Yet there's an intuitive & almost inevitable way to arrive at this expression.

Please take a look at this new cool dataset for SLAM, reconstruction, and radiance fields research. A work led by my colleagues Ethan Tao and Miguel Ángel Muñoz-Bañon (not here yet :( )

Really cool demonstrations of robotics and computer vision for plant analysis!

Not nice

I started to put together a starter pack for research in AI+Ecology, check it out and let me know if you would like to be added! go.bsky.app/8zugFF6

Hello everyone!! 👋 Excited to be here and share our latest work to get started! RoMo: Robust Motion Segmentation Improves Structure from Motion romosfm.github.io Boost the performance of your SfM pipeline on dynamic scenes! 🚀 RoMo masks dynamic objects in a video, in a zero-shot manner.

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)