We're proud to say that Professor Emily Shuckburgh CBE, the Director of ICCS, has been appointed as the UK Government's new Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Emily will remain in her ICCS post while helping the UK to reach #NetZero – bravo!

The UK *really* needs to set up a sovereign tech fund to support the vibrant open source scene here. Kudos to @openuk.bsky.social for pushing this in their recommendations to @ukri.org openuk.uk/theuksfuture...

Please repost! I am looking for a passionate and hard-working PhD student to work in southern Africa on experimental defaunation and rewilding of megafauna. See the link below for more information: @camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk

Part 1 covers the 2nd Programming for the Planet conference (@propl.dev) organised by @kcsrk.info @dorchard.bsky.social and me. There were talks, demos and discussions about what we can do as computer scientists to avert the climate and biodiversity crises anil.recoil.org/notes/icfp25... 🌍

A five part roundup of my @icfp-conference.bsky.social experience, covering chairing @propl.dev, holding an OxCaml tutorial, speaking about Docker, and what I learnt from everyone! anil.recoil.org/notes/icfp25; above all, huge thanks to @ilyasergey.bsky.social for making this ICFP/SPLASH so good

Completely full house for our OxCaml tutorial at #icfpsplash25! conf.researchr.org/details/icfp...

The 2nd PROPL is today, and will be livestreaming from www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIRJ... in an hour! Full program here conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp... and an overview of the program at dl.acm.org/action/showF...

📢 New blog! @charlesemogor.bsky.social uses machine learning to enhance anti-poaching across sub-Saharan Africa. Working with @anil.recoil.org, @fletcherecology.bsky.social and @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social, he is developing models to help rangers patrol effectively. Find out more: bit.ly/4mMs3Av

I've signed an open letter to the UN Article 4.6 supervisory body to not rule out nature from climate action targets anil.recoil.org/notes/do-not...; read the letter here docs.google.com/document/d/1... and sign up here docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... if you agree 🌍

Here's the official report from the NAS now, following my notes a few months ago about our 'big biodiversity meetup' in Washington DC anil.recoil.org/notes/nas-rs...

How do we measure life on Earth? 🌍🌱 The new summary report from the 2025 US-UK Forum on Measuring Biodiversity, hosted by the NAS and @royalsociety.org, explores tools, challenges, and solutions for tackling the #biodiversity crisis. Read here: bit.ly/460RB7R

As for biodiversity, a brand new study also confirms what's well established: overall ruminant meat, especially from grazing animals (which require more land, entailing more carbon & biodiversity opportunity costs) has the biggest 'extinction footprint' of all foods: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

I also knocked up a fun interactive global explorer where you can check out your favorite country and food choices to compare risks quantifyearth.github.io/food-globe/

Choosing where we source the food that we eat makes a difference to the environment, but how much? After churning through 100s of petabytes of data, we now know the answer varies by three orders of magnitude for species extinction risks! Paper out in Nature Food: www.nature.com/articles/s43... 🌍

New paper on making the Internet more resilient. Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet | Proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Excited to announce the 25th Student Conservation in Conservation Science will be held in Cambridge 31 March-2 April 2026. @sccscambridge.bsky.social @camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk For more information, see: www.sccs-cam.org

The most incredibly fun part of this Nature comment on evidence synthesis we published today is that the cartoonist (David Parkins) also did Beano and Dennis the Menace (!) A true legend. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our piece on the poisoning of the literature. Will AI speed up literature reviews or derail them entirely? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

One way in which AI enriches my life is that I can go from “ooh, that’s a funky looking caterpillar” to a fun Wikipedia rabbithole in a few seconds, thanks to iOS’s automatic plant and animal detection in photos. This is a cinnabar moth caterpillar, apparently

Due to the world being a little unpredictable right now, we've extended the submission deadline for PROPL by a few days, so it's now 8th July 2025 AoE! conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp...

A reminder that our submission deadline is coming up in just over a week on the 3rd July AOE! Get your short papers in, or talk proposals, or a short provocation what's needed for programming languages research to contribute to addressing the climate crisis. propl.dev

Congratulations to Prof Srinivasan Keshav on receiving the inuagural #ACM SIGEnergy Achievement Award for his "pioneering contributions to energy systems and informatics, including seminal research, capacity building, and helping to create SIGENERGY and eEnergy." energy.acm.org/sigenergy-ac...

My learnings from attending the recent @nationalacademies.org and @royalsociety.org scientific meeting on measuring global biodiversity anil.recoil.org/notes/nas-rs... 🧪🌍

We trained 10 large language models with 6 retrieval strategies then compared all of these with our experts with access to literature. Well-trained LLMs won! General LLMs without extra training are likely to perform poorly and misinform decision-makers journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

New paper out today on how the careful design of LLMs is crucial for expert-level evidence retrieval in conservation (but with implications for any evidence synthesis pipeline across other fields) 🌍 doi.org/10.1371/jour... and anil.recoil.org/news/2024-ce... for a summary

Amid the hype about AI’s potential to turbocharge human abilities, researchers like Sam Reynolds, Chris Sandbrook and @sadiq.toao.com at @conservation.cam.ac.uk are leading conversations to make sure we advance with eyes wide open. Read www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-f...

Am at the @ai.cam.ac.uk day today at the @conservation.cam.ac.uk institute to talk about all the environmental work ongoing!

"Technology needs to unite conservation, not divide it". My thoughts on our letter published today in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and what we need to be doing as (hopefully) responsible technologists in a world increasingly focused on AI 🌍. anil.recoil.org/notes/ai-sho...

LOCO2024 talks are now online! My notes anil.recoil.org/notes/loco24...

Delighted by the enthusiasm for the YouTube playlist of ecology and conservation videos for undergraduates. Any I should exclude or add from the channel? Any key topics I should film? youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Yay for the first unikernel paper getting the ASPLOS most influential paper award, and some reflections on it anil.recoil.org/notes/uniker...

Our Planetary Computing Fellow Dr Sadiq Jaffer @sadiq.toao.com works on an AI 'Conservation Co-Pilot'. And PhD student Zhengpeng Feng helped develop the 'GreenLens' app to measure trees on the ground more quickly and accurately than a person with a tape measure. www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-a...

The stories here shed light on how our researchers are pioneering ways to use #AI to protect nature and climate. For example, our Planetary Computing Professor @anil.recoil.org is developing the 'Terra' AI, a predictive model of all terrestrial life on Earth. www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-a...

A new AI weather prediction system can deliver accurate forecasts tens of times faster and using thousands of times less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems. www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/fully-a...

Just a few days left to apply for this #technician position in my group! Like #forests? #Data? #Python? Working outside? Come and help support our research using high resolution #remotesensing #lidar data to study #forests 👇 Please share!

For those curious about the first workshop in 2023, the videos are up at www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZeS... (and mirrored watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk/c/propl24/vi...)

Using TLS-segmented high res drone RGB imagery we found dramatic reductions in performance of two well known models - DeepForest (RetinaNet) and Detectree2 (Mask R-CNN) - when compared to their performance on manual annotations (AP50 IOU on bounding box only segmentation: 0.094 vs. 0.670) (2/6)

🌤️ Our #AI weather forecasting model has been published today in Nature 🤖 🥇the first AI weather model to learn directly from raw environmental observations 🌎 compared to existing AI models it is cheaper to train, uses less carbon and easier to deploy locally www.turing.ac.uk/news/fully-a...

👀 Fancy a summer internship working at the intersection of programming languages, AI/ML and HCI, working on a new language being developed at ICCS for open climate science communication? See @f.luid.org and www.epsrc.group.cam.ac.uk/DTP/internsh... for more information. ⏰ Deadline Fri 14 March!

Happy that our (@iccscambridge.bsky.social) JOSS paper on FTorch has been accepted and is now out. This is a really neat library, smoothly enabling coupling of ML models developed in PyTorch into Fortran code, now being used in various climate models (+ other scientific domains too). Well done team!

What does great evidence synthesis look like and where is #AI being successfully applied in this field? 💭 Great discussions yesterday at our AI for #evidencesynthesis workshop as we examined the strengths and limitations of current tools, areas of progress and promising applications of AI.

Our new paper and software tool PointsToWood is out! Led by Harry Owen and Targeted at high performance for small branches, PointsToWood performs #deeplearning enabled leaf-wood semantic segmentation of high resolution #TLS point clouds. 🌿 🌲 🌳 👇performance on unseen tropical data

Our @eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk group discussion this week was around what AI tools people are actually using, and I must say it came up a little short. Now I'm curious about what tools other people are actually using for real... anil.recoil.org/notes/the-st...

We're looking forward to being part of #CamFest 2025! At our Open Day on Sat 22 March visitors can 'tour' the Dawn supercomputer, chat to a robot, make music with code, discover how AI can help you with your insomnia - or turn you into a guitar genius! - and more. www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/tour-su...

Our newest research in @nature.com We built a robot (!) to track plant-fungal trade networks. By following half a million fungal highways & nutrient flows within them, we discovered how plants & fungi build hyper-efficient supply chains www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📹 @sasaspacal.bsky.social

The free 'GreenLens' app uses #AI to measure tree 🌳diameter. It's highly accurate – yet runs on a cheap, second-hand Android phone. Developed by researchers here, the app is for anyone interested in protecting & restoring forests. www.cst.cam.ac.uk/using-ai-see...

Disentangling nature carbon credits from carbon offsets, via a method known as "carbon contributions". I'd particularly value feedback from anyone who has noped out of carbon offsetting, and might be persuaded by the cleaner incentives in this new mechanism instead. 🌎 anil.recoil.org/notes/carbon...

Switching to end-to-end encrypted communications is more important than than ever; here are some notes on our switch from Slack to using @matrix.org via the very useful Hookshot bot. anil.recoil.org/notes/enter-...

Just published in JOSS: 'fortran-src: Fortran static analysis infrastructure' https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07571

Delighted to see this major initiative finally out. Led by @stefanopuliti.bsky.social and leveraging the huge @3dforecotech.bsky.social community's efforts we present a major AI benchmarking dataset with classification results for point cloud tree species identification. (1/3)