Energy & Environment Group, Cambridge Computer Science

GeoTessera 0.10 is out now, a year after our first release! Highlights: switches to the @source.coop for hosting, adds support for v2 beta (with matryoshka), and much better Zarr streaming support (see tze.geotessera.org for this in the browser). anil.recoil.org/notes/geotes...

The 3rd Programming for the Planet talk videos are now live, with notes on anil.recoil.org/notes/pldi26.... By @neurocy.bsky.social @anil.recoil.org @kcsrk.info @dorchard.bsky.social and also up at www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Was down at the @royalsociety.org last night for Andrew Balmford's epic talk "on feeding the world without costing the earth" as the inaugural winner of the RS Environment Medal. Here's my notes on it including that rarest of sightings: Andrew in a suit! anil.recoil.org/notes/ab-rs-... 🌍

I dropped by Edinburgh for a workshop on 'rewilding the web', with participation from philosophers, technologists, ecologists, architects, mathematicians, authors and landscape planners. anil.recoil.org/notes/rewild... @kathrynnave.eurosky.social @mariafarrell.eurosky.social @robin.berjon.com 🌎

Some 'behind the scenes' about appearing on the BBC/ITV/etc last week talking about... hedgehogs and AI, of all things. anil.recoil.org/notes/hedgeh... 🌏

The answer isn't to blame the projects, but the market failure racing to the bottom for forestry credits, while direct air capture (with none of the environmental co-benefits) charges 100x more per tonne! 🧪🌍🌐 My thoughts on this at anil.recoil.org/notes/redd-o...

Tropical forests deserve a higher base price for carbon credits, and credible ex-post evaluations are one path to help get there. Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com on learning lessons from past REDD+ over-crediting. 🧪🌍🌐 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How we did planetary scale training and inference with AMD and Vultr geotessera.org/blog/2026-03...

Two releases of the TESSERA Embedding Explorer (tee.cl.cam.ac.uk) this week: v3.4 adds manual labelling with pin and polygon tools, per-class similarity sliders, and spatial classifiers. v3.5 adds a multi-user login system to the demo site. geotessera.org/blog#tee-v3....

You can also query our dynamic embeddings coverage viewer and request more for your environmental projects geotessera.org/coverage

TESSERA has a shiny new website up at geotessera.org which you can scroll through to get an introduction to geospatial embeddings! You can try the two global explorers, one hosted (tee.cl.cam.ac.uk) and one that streams purely in-browser using Zarr (tze.geotessera.org)

Last week Frank Feng and I joined Robin Cole on his satellite image deep learning podcast to talk about Tessera: how it works, how it differs from existing models, and our future plans. Thanks for hosting us, Robin! www.satellite-image-deep-learning.com/p/tessera-a-...

It still surprises me you can get good performance with even tiny models on top of TESSERA embeddings. Here's how to find solar farms in the UK with a small ~42k CNN: toao.com/blog/earth-o...

There has been outrage as the @acm.org rolls out AI generated summaries of papers. This is doing AI exactly wrong by replacing valuable, peer-reviewed content with a possibly inaccurate summary. It's still not too late to correct it though and use AI responsibly... anil.recoil.org/notes/acm-ai...

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas here at the EEG!

geotessera 0.7.1 is out to meet all your planetary geospatial hacking needs. It now has an efficient Parquet registry for the 1.2m+ tiles of CC-BY licensed global embeddings, and Zarr format support for more efficient chunking and distributed processing. Enjoy! 🌍 anil.recoil.org/notes/geotes...

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...