I've just taken Kyutai's speech-to-text model for a spin on my Mac laptop, and it's stunningly good. As background, this is what the prolific Laurent Mazare has been hacking on; he has made a ton of contributions to the OCaml community as well, such as ocaml-torch and starred in a very fun Signals to Threads episode on machine learning at Jane Street back in 2020.

I was a bit sleepy getting into the Royal Society Future of Scientific Publishing conference early this morning, but was quickly woken up by the dramatic passion on show as publishers, librarians, academics and funders all got together for a "frank exchange of views" at a meeting that didn't pull any punches! These are my hot-off-the-press livenotes and only lightly edited; a more cleaned up version will be available from the RS in due course.

For the past few years, Sadiq Jaffer and I been working with our colleagues in Conservation Evidence to do analysis at scale on the academic literature. Getting local access to millions of fulltext papers has not been without drama, but made possible thanks to huge amounts of help from our University Library who helped us navigate our relationships with scientific publishers.

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.

Every ten years, the city of Aarhus throws a giant conference to discuss new agendas for critical action and theory in computing.

Apple made a notable announcement in WWDC 2025 that they've got a new containerisation framework in the new Tahoe beta. This took me right back to the early Docker for Mac days in 2016 when we announced the first mainstream use of the hypervisor framework, so I couldn't resist taking a quick peek under the hood.

I stayed on for a few days extra in Washington DC after the biodiversity extravaganza to attend a workshop at legendary National Geographic Basecamp.

Evaluating a human-in-the-loop AI framework to improve inclusion criteria for evidence synthesis This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer.

Evaluating LLMs for providing evidence-based information on conservation actions This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Radhika Agrawal. It is co-supervised with Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer. We are building a Conservation Co-Pilot to improve worldwide conservation action through evidence-driven insights.

Habitat mapping of the Cairngormes Connect restoration area This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Isabel Mansley. It is co-supervised with David Coomes and Aland Chan.

ZFS replication strategies with encryption This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Becky Terefe-Zenebe. It is co-supervised with Mark Elvers. We are using ZFS in much of our Planetary Computing infrastructure due to its ease of remote replication. Therefore, its performance characteristics when used as a local filesystem are particularly interesting.