Professor of Computer Science
Maynooth University Ireland
Interests: #PatternRecognition, #Statistics, #machinelearning #deeplearning #AI #datascience #computerscience #ComputerVision #SignalProcessing #RemoteSensing #GIS ...
This shapeshifting caterpillar robot can change its size to get through tricky situations. We found it crawling around ICRA 2025.
ICRA is the flagship conference of IEEE RAS. To learn more about this and other upcoming RAS conferences, visit: https://www.ieee-ras.org/conferences-workshops/upcoming-conferences
And visit the RAS site: https://www.ieee-ras.org/
Subscribe to our Robotics Newsletter: https://engage.ieee.org/Robotics-News-Sign-Up-Lead-Gen.html
🎓 PhD Studentship Alert 💰
Want to do a fully funded PhD in serious games? 🕹️
We have a studentship opening at Imperial on using service design to create games for undergraduate science curricula.
Apply by August 17, UK home students only.
Full details 👉 https://bit.ly/games-phd-25
@ or DM me, please share!
It always was a matter of incentives, but the script has been flipped for the worse.
"the scientific enterprise is now witness to widespread, organized defection from the scientific public goods game. Large swaths of players, among them many scientists, reviewers, editors and publishers, are choosing to no longer make genuine contributions to the pot."
Good write up on a recent PNAS paper.
https://reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a-do-or-die-moment-for-the-scientific-enterprise/
Never let people tell you it's impossible to deGoogle your life. 💪
Start by checking Tuta's discount now: https://tuta.com/goeuropean
The Rise and Fall of the Knowledge Worker
https://jacobin.com/2025/07/knowledge-workers-ai-globalization-deindustrialization
Researchers caught hiding AI prompts in papers to get favorable reviews. Talk about artificial intelligence meeting artificial integrity. The invisible ink of academic dishonesty! 🔍✍️
Great! A bunch of us here wanted it. Now it exists. 👍
It's a "dark archive" of the arXiv - a non-public backup to save the data in case of attack by hackers or the US government. The arXiv, I hope you know, is the biggest source of modern math and physics papers.
Who got the job done? The TIB: the Technische Informationsbibliothek, run by the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, in Hannover, Germany.
They write:
"The TIB has now set up a so-called dark archive for the arXiv content in order to be able to make the backed-up data accessible if the data stored in the USA is lost. The archive functions as a silent reserve: the complete copy of the content is stored decentrally at the TIB, but is not publicly accessible. This means that the data stock – almost 10 terabytes – is protected against potential outages and can be activated in an emergency.
The TIB is currently working on processes to keep the archive up to date: new submissions and updated versions must be backed up regularly in order to preserve the state of research as completely as possible.
“Building a Dark Archive is an expression of our longstanding commitment for a reliable, international academic provision, and as a partner of arXiv. Even though the Dark Archive today only works in the background, it is a key element in safeguarding digital research contents in the long term, because in case of a crisis, we could open the archive,” explains Dr Irina Sens, Deputy Director of the TIB."
We should call it the darXiv.
More details here:
https://blog.tib.eu/2025/05/14/protecting-science-tib-builds-dark-archive-for-arxiv/
#GRETSI2025 30e colloque francophone de Traitement du Signal et des Images, 25-29 août 2025, Palais de la musique et des congrès, Strasbourg. Environ 500 participant(e)s académiques & industriels Inscription à tarif préférentiel jusqu’au 9 juillet 2025 https://gretsi.fr/colloque2025/inscription/
Lyon ditching Microsoft.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/26/lyon_leaving_microsoft/
#microsoft #lyon #france #foss #opensource
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wanted to have at least 5 Saudi universities among the top 200 in the world by 2030.
So he paid lots of scientists to falsely claim they worked in Saudi Arabia! Some got up to €70,000 a year just for pretending to work there.
Unfortunately they got caught. The newspaper El Pais exposed the scam.
In 2022, Saudi Arabia had 109 professors on the List of Highly Cited Researchers, compiled by Clarivate. After a bunch got caught, the number dropped to 26. 🤣
Someone should carefully check those 26 researchers.
In fact this "List of Highly Cited Researchers" is a fraud magnet. As of 2024, one in three apparently highly cited researchers has been caught engaging in bad practices.
This is a great example of Goodhart's Law: ""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Thanks to @mansr for pointing this out.
Listen up Mastodonians, because this is important:
Right now we have a unique chance to rise up and hit back against Zuckerberg and Musk. Because italian filmmaker @_elena and her friends have made an OUTSTANDING short film, which explains why people should quit the fascist social networks and come join us in the fediverse.
Hit the fascists where it hurts — make this go viral by watching it and liking it on YouTube, then hit the share button and share it everywhere!
In response to the ever-increasing number of submissions to the Open Journal of Astrophysics, I'd like to invite more astrophysicistsonto our Editorial Board. We're looking for volunteers with expertise in any area of astrophysics!
Please contact me or @OJ_Astro
Breakthrough ideas start here.
The SIGGRAPH 2025 Technical Papers program showcases the latest innovations in computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfHC0wNYry8&t=8s
When: August 10–14, 2025
Where: Vancouver, Canada
📢 We are hiring! Are you looking for a career in spatial data science? Two new positions (deadline 1st of August!):
- Research assistant / PhD candidate: Hybrid geospatial modeling of carbon fluxes and associated uncertainty for scenario testing (https://opengeohub.org/jobs/research-assistant-phd-candidate-hybrid-geospatial-modeling-of-carbon-fluxes-and-associated-uncertainty-for-scenario-testing/ jointly with https://scicomm.xyz/@derekkarssenberg, University of Utrecht), 4 years
- Research assistant: modeling land use & land cover dynamics using ML and AI (https://opengeohub.org/jobs/research-assistant-modeling-land-use-land-cover-dynamics-using-ml-and-ai/), 2+ years
Projects: @earthmonitororg and #OGCR
New article in @nature covering RoRI's recent study of 100,000+ grant applicants across 14 funding programmes, shedding new light on the Matthew effect in science: how early funding success can compound over a researcher's career - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01952-w
Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3
RT @rohanpaul_ai
Yann LeCun is not so optimistic about LLMs. 😟
"We are not going to get to human level AI by just scaling up MLMs. This is just not going to happen. There's no way. Okay, absolutely no way. And whatever you can hear from some of my uh more adventurous colleagues, it's not going to happen within the next two years.
There's absolutely no way in hell. You know the idea that we're we're going to have you know a country of genius in a data center that's complete BS. There's absolutely no way what we're going to have maybe is systems that are trained on sufficiently large amounts of data that any question that any reasonable person may ask will will find an answer through those systems and it would feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you but it's not a PhD you have next to you.
It's system with a gigantic memory and retrieval ability not not a system that can invent solutions to to new problems, which is really what a PhD is. "
We spoke to 15 teachers about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives. "Honestly, if we ejected all the genAI tools into the sun, I would be quite pleased."
Probably a good idea teachers are recycling this method.
“Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%”
They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back
#AI
https://archive.ph/JtpKt
"#Désinformer, donner du poids aux #faussesinformations, aux #complots aux #Rumeurs coûte bien moins cher que de bien informer. A partir du moment où l'#information devient une marchandise vendue au poids, au temps d'antenne, elle devient médiocre". Le livre d'Olivier Legrain montre comment on en est arrivé là (à l'accaparement par 10 #milliardaires de 90% des ventes de quotidiens nationaux, 55% de l'audience des télés et 40% de celle des radios) et comment cette situation menace la #democratie Et comment on peut encore "Sauver l'information de l'emprise des milliardaires".
Et ça me donne une furieuse envie de retourner à mon métier de #journaliste !
