Customers of online services may want to take carbon emissions into account when deciding which service to use, but it's currently difficult to do so due to the lack of reliable emissions data that is comparable across online services.

All the work we've been doing on biodiversity (such as LIFE) comes at a fairly large computation and storage cost due to the amount of data that we churn through. This gets worse when you consider the exploratory nature of science -- we sometimes just need to mess around with the large dataset to test hypotheses which are often shown to be wrong.

I got invited to join the Royal Society and DeepMind to a summit on how AI is revolutionising scientific discovery and trotted along with Jon Crowcroft. This event is hot on the heels of the excellent RS report on Science in the Age of AI and, of course, the Nobel prize for Demis Hassabis which was the first ever for my department! The event was held at the BAFTA today, and what follows are my quick livenotes as there was just so much to absorb.

Sophie Chapman lead an effort to explore a novel legal framework for forest carbon credits that separates carbon tenure (i.e. title and associated property rights to the land and trees which store the carbon) from the carbon rights (i.e. title and associated rights to monetise and manage the credits which symbolically represent the carbon stored in the trees), while also specifying the relationship between the carbon tenure and the carbon

Josh Millar presented our work on biodiversity sensing over at ACM Sensys 2024 in China. The full set of papers and demos has a range of impressive work on sensor networks, and some that stood out to me follow.

We have just uploaded a preprint on using LLMs for conservation evidence, based on our work on large-scale crawling of the academic literature. Well done in particular to Radhika Iyer for having done the bulk of the evaluation on this as part of a very productive summer internship with us!

Smita Vijayakumar went along to Seattle to SOCC 2024 to present her PhD research on Murmuration. This is a new scheduler for Kubernetes that allows for 15%--25% faster job completion times than the default scheduler for different job arrival characteristics in datacenters that are very busy.

I got invited by Sertaç Sehlikoglu to deliver a lecture to the Masters students down at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. I talked about the recent work on planetary computing, with an overview of the LIFE and FOOD papers.

After some time away from cloud computing (due to my new focus on conservation research), I served on the ACM SOCC 2024 program committee. It was quite interesting seeing the massive shift away from "traditional" cloud research (such as consensus protocols) towards many submissions aimed at accelerating machine learning workloads.

Here are the various repos used to create the interactive teaching environment we use for 1A Foundations of Computer Science in Cambridge. It may be useful to other professors who are using OCaml in their courses.