Anil Madhavapeddy's feed

Anil Madhavapeddy · anil.recoil.org · English

Anil Madhavapeddy's research combines computer science and environmental science at the University of Cambridge

atom fediverse blogroll

Open the feed

https://anil.recoil.org/news.xml

Last post: Sep 20, 2026
Posts in 24 h · 7 days · 30 days: 0 · 1 · 9
Our last check: Answering
Served from: France
Site title: About
Format: atom
Community: fediverse, blogroll

Posts

What our queue read from this feed. Open one to read it here, or go to the site that published it.

.plan-26-38: Near, far, wherever you are, Tessera infers on
Sep 20, 2026 · original
Tessera now has wall to wall embeddings over nine years! The big news this week is that Tessera community member dClimate announced that global wall-to-wall v1.1 Tessera embeddings are now available on AWS for 2017-2025! This marks the first time that we have complete embeddings coverage for so many years for any of our models, which is a giant milestone for the project. This inference was possible thanks to a grant that dClimate received from AWS Open Data . This also highlights just how cool working in the open is, since dClimate reimplemented the Tessera inference engine to specialise it to high-performance processing on cloud infras. We've been exchanging tips since May on our Zulip and clarifying various details in their codebase . Having an independent validation of our inference methods is as much of a big deal as the embeddings themselves, given the importance of these to such a
.plan-26-37: The humans aren't dead, the humans are ahead
Sep 13, 2026 · original
This week's been a busy news week with more human endeavour having their AI reckonings . Mathematics had its turn with Navier–Stokes , which got me thinking about formative assessment in the CST Tripos . Meanwhile I spent a ton of my time triaging endless security bugs found by LLMs in open source code, but the humans aren't dead yet and there's no need to panic. I also had a lovely visit from Echo Labs , and went back to fighting Windows in Eio and GeoTessera. Every field is getting its own AI reckoning Everyone was panicking about cybersecurity a few months ago being turned on its head by AI, and this week it was the turn of the mathematics community. Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge were hacking on a solution to the Navier–Stokes problem for about a year. OpenAI heard a rumour of a breakthrough, pointed their giant cluster at it, and had a solution a few days later. There's obviou
Hitting a NERVE with attacks on AI-powered brain-computer interfaces
Sep 11, 2026 · original
Human brain interfaces are advancing at a startling pace; Ray Kurzweil has just joined a startup that dispenses with skull surgery in favour of you snorting charged nanoparticles that are then driven by magnetic coils in a cap. This all sounds very scifi, but the software stack on these BCI devices have an enormous and unguarded attack surface. Zahra Tarkhani has just uploaded a preprnt NERVE Attacks: Breaking AI-Powered Brain-Computer Interfaces that we worked on with two brilliant interns who visited last summer, Georgios Akkogiounoglou (KTH) and Isabel Tscherniak (TUM), and Lorena Qendro at Nokia Bell Labs. Back in 2022, our first pass at this found over 300 vulnerabilities across the stacks of commodity BCI headsets. The new paper categorises this surface into what we dub the NERVE attacks , which between them cover the entire Brain-Computer stack from the radio interface to the unde
Open MPhil/Part II student projects for 2026-2027
Sep 9, 2026 · original
I've refreshed my project ideas for incoming CST Part II and MPhil students who are starting in October 2026 (term's starting soon!). As ever, these aren't an exhaustive list but a good starting point for things we might work on together. See also Srinivasan Keshav 's own list for even more. The open projects fall into two rough batches: applying compsci to solve difficult environmental problems , and more conventional systems / programming languages work on verification, effects or unikernels . Almost everything on the list is pitched at an MPhil-level project, but it's fairly easy to pitch it up and down to a Part II/III depending on your enthusiasm. You have a much better chance of getting my attention if you show evidence of thinking and researching the idea a bit before getting in touch. I unfortunately receive dozens and dozens of LLM-generated CVs a week these days and easily miss
.plan-26-36: Ground control to major MODIS
Sep 6, 2026 · original
Got back to Cambridge mid-week and back on the keyboard to start preparing for Michaelmas term, which creeps up fast! Tessera v2 beta2 turns out to smooth space at the cost of time, so beta1 may be as far as the v2 series goes without a retrain. Evidence TAP gets a splendid explainer from Sam and some new Associate Scholars at Pembroke, along with a TDM reservations library and some thoughts on working across OCaml and OxCaml . Elsewhere there's Scrutineer's git workflow and an invitation to a bug sprint, rather a lot of the Windows tax , why AI disclosure is a social problem rather than a technical one, a fourth Recoil host running OpenBSD, and the usual fun links . Tessera v2 beta2 and the temporal axis Mark Elvers and I published more Tessera v2.0 beta2 to source.coop this week to test out some fixes to the improved embeddings. The v1 embeddings sometimes show a "checkerboard" where S
Security scanning my own code with Scrutineer and local coding models
Aug 31, 2026 · original
After the recent surge of security reports in my projects, I wanted to help us open source maintainers use scanning tools to find bugs before the bad guys do. Luckily, Andrew Nesbitt leapt in enthusiastically with Scrutineer , a new project he's working on to help maintainers proactively manage the flood. I decided to give it a quick spin. By default, Scrutineer supports a number of different coding models, but I remain blocked on access to frontier models without security guardrails for our own code. Therefore, I decided to get a local coding model powered by GLM 5.3 running on my own Mac Studio. Read on if you want to set up your own instance; Scrutineer is worryingly good at finding lots of bugs! What Scrutineer does Scrutineer is a scanner built under the Alpha-Omega project. It lets me add a Git repository or a whole org of them, and then schedules a big pipeline of agent scans via
.plan-26-35: All I want for Tesseramas is (GP)U
Aug 30, 2026 · original
I've been in Ireland again this week for the bank holiday, which also saw us celebrate a year of Tessera hacking while hunting for more GPUs to support our users' embedding requests. I also got Scrutineer scanning my own code using a local GLM-5.3 model, the PROPL 2026 videos are live , and I wrote a text and data mining reservations library for Evidence TAP . Meanwhile, Ryan Gibb flew the flag for our ICFP 2026 paper over in Indiana. A year of Tessera embeddings It's been a whole year since the first GeoTessera release, woohoo! I put together a brief recap and released GeoTessera 0.10 , which moves our hosting over to the Source Cooperative with UTM-native Zarr routing and Matryoshka reads for the v2 beta. The sync of the Tessera v1.1 embeddings onto the Source Cooperative also finished this week, so those are now browsable via tze.geotessera.org as well (click on the model version on t
The 3rd Programming for the Planet 2026 videos are available
Aug 28, 2026 · original
The recordings from the 3rd ACM Programming for the Planet (PROPL) workshop have gone live on PLDI's YouTube playlist . As usual I've mirrored them onto our self-hosted Watch EEG instance . I attended remotely this year as I couldn't make it across the ocean, and enjoyed rewatching the talks. This was the third outing of PROPL after London in 2024 and Singapore last year . We decided to split the workshop into two halves this year: a morning of position talks followed by an afternoon of working groups aimed at action items for the community. The morning talks are what's recorded below, and Cyrus Omar , Dominic Orchard , KC Sivaramakrishnan and I will be working on summarising the living document , (which covers a wide gamut of user experience, interoperability, scaling, AI and sociotechnical challenges) over the coming months. I'm also delighted that Cyrus Omar , who chaired this year's
Celebrating a year of Tessera embeddings and releasing GeoTessera 0.10
Aug 27, 2026 · original
I can't believe it's been a whole year since we released the first GeoTessera library to make the TESSERA embeddings easier to get your mittens on. Quite a lot of adoption has happened since! I'm going to quickly review a year of embedding requests and the people who filed them, explain the move to the Source Cooperative for our hosting, what the Zarr upgrades with UTM routing and matryoshka entail, how the CLI works, and show you a guided tour that builds a land classifier and sonar panel detector. A year of embedding requests Because we didn't have enough GPUs to pre-generate embeddings for everywhere in the world, we opened up our GitHub repo for people to request priority map areas they needed . This turned out to be a great way for us to meet our users and build community; there have been people from all over the globe getting in touch! Geographically, most of the world is covered,
.plan-26-34: Am I human or am I antibotty
Aug 23, 2026 · original
I've been in Ireland again this week so not a lot of work time. I did finish the TESSERA v2 beta embeddings conversion and queued up a new geotessera release, handled some OCaml security releases and noted down my thoughts on security embargoes, and how opam-repository now requires a human behind every package . There are also fresh releases of prometheus 2.0 and eio 1.5 , and some fun links to finish. I also finished my POPL reserve PC reviews, with a fair degree of slop writing but also a really interesting one that I spent quite a while on and really enjoyed. Geotessera 0.10 and the embeddings explorer I prepared a v0.10.0 release of geotessera ( #374 ) that I used to finish the Zarr conversions of the v1.0 and v2-2B-L~beta1 embeddings. The latter are interesting not only for their massive accuracy improvements (the distilled v2 embeddings lead every open and proprietary embedding pro
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
Aug 22, 2026 · original
I released a security fix for OCaml's cohttp 6.3.0 today, fixing a path traversal issue . The patch itself was straightforward and in normal times, the security procedure would have been to fix it privately, inform affected users, and then issue a public advisory. This time around though, I noticed probes in my live webserver logs with the exact bug pattern just minutes after opening the PR to fix the issue . What's worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumour of a security issue seems enough to give attackers enough info to find new exploits, we're going to need to change the way we deal with security responses in open source. The rumour of a bug is all new agentic exploit systems need This particular report arrived private
Using Forester to turn Foundations of CS into interactive evergreen lectures
Aug 16, 2026 · original
I've heard good feedback from my undergrad students about how Jon Sterling publishes his 1A Discrete Maths lectures in a structured online form using his own Forester tool . As my sabbatical comes to an end, I've started prepping my own Foundations of CS course [1] for resuming lecturing in October. I ported this course to Jupyter a few years ago along with a nice printable set of notes with the same content. Over the last week, I've experimented with porting the Markdown FoCS lecture sources over to use Forester instead. I like Jon's perspective on evergreen notes , and also the idea of interlinking concepts across lecture courses eventually. This is now online as a draft interactive forest of the 2026–27 notes . First, I'll jot down notes on how forests are structured , then on making the forest into a live program by embedding the OCaml compiler into the browser, and finally on publis
.plan-26-33: Zarro rides out and evidence papers pour in
Aug 16, 2026 · original
Am back in Ireland again this week, after a quick stint back in Cambridge to catch the 90% eclipse of the heart . The major preprint that went out this week was on weather downscaling with TESSERA embeddings . I also did a chunk of teaching prep (October is coming up fast!) and started porting Foundations of CS to Forester . The week itself then went on getting TESSERA 1.0 onto Source Cooperative in Zarr with global RGB previews to go with it, putting up a public website for Evidence TAP , teaching the paper downloader some manners , and pointing a VLM at the PDFs . There's some OCaml hacking and fun links at the end. Tessera dons the mask of Zarro We finally have TESSERA 1.0 fully on source.coop in Zarr format, with 1.1 well on its way! Since we finally have enough disk space to stage everything thanks to source.coop, I also generated global RGB preview pyramids. You can now use TZE to
Improving local weather forecasts using Tessera embeddings
Aug 13, 2026 · original
Pedro Sousa has put his first preprint paper online, on the topic of improving weather prediction using satellite foundation models! " Earth observation embeddings are effective sub-grid descriptors for probabilistic weather downscaling " (also on arXiv ) was joint work with Sadiq Jaffer , Robin Young , Will Tebbutt and Rich Turner with much help from the wider Tessera team. Since the paper is quite machine learning heavy I wrote up a splainer here. I had to get rapidly up to speed on how weather forecasting works when we started working on this at the start of the year! How weather downscaling works today Weather forecasts and the " reanalysis " datasets that reconstruct the past atmosphere (such as ERA5 ), are usually plotted on grids of ~25km. Each grid cell tracks the temperature, wind, precipitation, etc within it, but on a patch bigger than (e.g.) Cambridge and its surrounding vill
.plan-26-32: Finally a use for serverless and found the Forester for the trees
Aug 9, 2026 · original
Two paper updates this week! The first is that our GETMobile article on micro-NPUs got published in the ACM SIGMOBILE magazine . This is a shorter, more digestible magazine version of the paper from last year . Great work by Josh Millar ! Then Ryan Gibb gave an excellent SRG practice presentation of his forthcoming ICFP 2026 paper on formalising package management calculi . His slides were dense with cool math, which emerged from his use of Slipshow . The ICFP camera ready is also now available, with the coveted artefact badges! The official ICFP DOI will be live once the conference is done in a few weeks. The rest of the week went on converting the TESSERA embeddings to Zarr with my first use of AWS Fargate's serverless offering, rebuilding the Evidence TAP paper infrastructure around Django and Capnp, a summer internship wrapup on hunting and ranger patrols , planning the port of Found
Updating to the OxCaml 5.2.0-minus39 opam packaging
Aug 8, 2026 · original
This website is written using the OxCaml language extensions from Jane Street, so I can experiment with zero allocation frameworks written in OCaml. Since David Allsopp released oxcaml-minus39 a few weeks ago, I've updated to that. This first required figuring out the packaging of some of the third-party dependencies that I require. Using OxCaml is more complex than vanilla OCaml since many existing packages fail to compile due to it requiring additional type annotations or eta-expansions. However, there's a neat set of guard packages present in the OxCaml opam overlay that make it straightforward to find compatible versions. My own need was for Eio , as Eio =1.3 didn't build under OxCaml. The Jane Street overlay shipped an eio.1.3+ox fork built from a patched branch. Thomas Leonard and I fixed the OxCaml build issues in Eio 1.4 , but found ourselves blocked from using it due to the syst
GetMOBILE article on benchmarking micro-NPUs now out
Aug 5, 2026 · original
Josh Millar lead an article just out in GETMOBILE on our work from last year on benchmarking micro-NPUs to help make sense of the growing number of dedicated, ultra-low-power 'neural network accelerators'. There are lots of hidden embedded NPUs in modern low-cost chips, ranging from ESP32 -based boards over to ARM ones. All of these have quite a variety of tradeoffs, from the operations supported (which affects which models can be run on them) to the amount of memory and CPU power. If you'd like a shorter, more accessible summary of that paper, then head over to read our article. Feedback is most welcome! While the hardware landscape hasn't changed hugely since last year's article, the software one has. I'm now finding that using coding agents to write low-level embedded code is far far faster than before. Modern harnesses are pretty good at figuring out the various quirks of each cross-
.plan-26-31: Sorting out Tessera and Evidence TAP infrastructure
Aug 2, 2026 · original
I had a bunch of infrastructure work I had to get done this week, and so I went headsdown hacking to sort out both TESSERA and the Evidence TAP this week! I spent it moving a petabyte of TESSERA embeddings onto Source Cooperative, taking a detour to investigate Icechunk before settling on transcoding to Zarr on AWS Fargate Spot . Then my custom PDF downloader Taposaur arose to obtain the literature for Evidence TAP, by extracting structured metadata with GROBID and downloading papers with a capability-based OCaml downloader . I continued Eio work Windows now that 1.4 is out, mirrored some databases for the Dash for Life , and wanted to advertise some super fun jobs on deep learning SDMs . The fun links at the end feature an unexpected newspaper appearance by yours truely and my first new unikernel boot trace in some years! Moving a petabyte of TESSERA embeddings Mark Elvers and I have be
.plan-26-30: Bananas ripen, models open, and OxCaml releases
Jul 26, 2026 · original
I was in Ireland most of the week attending to family matters, so another quieter weeknote! My picture of the week is that the Pembroke College Cambridge banana tree has, err, sprouted real bananas, so I'm trying to pluck up the courage to attempt to pickle them and not poison anyone. I appeared up in the OpenUK openness report , got the Evidence TAP website prototyped using an agent on exe.dev , cut Eio, cohttp and mdx releases along with a comprehensive OxCaml and Claude skills update , started taking Windows seriously now that Forester has found me a real user, and on matters of nature followed a discussion on conservation versus ecology and celebrated funding for optimising ranger patrols . The usual fun links are at the end. The UK Openness report from OpenUK OpenUK published their excellent AI Openness report this month. I'm in there with a fireside chat on open foundation models l
.plan-26-29: Perfect weather, imperfectly measured, precisely predicted
Jul 19, 2026 · original
I returned to Cambridge during the nice lull after the exams and graduation rush, and enjoyed a very pleasant week indeed catching up! I examined my first viva in the Faculty of Law , ran a TESSERA stall at the House of Lords , saw exciting results on downscaling the weather with TESSERA , went digging into the sorry state of our own rooftop weather station , got stuck into moving TESSERA onto Source Cooperative , enjoyed hosting the Pembroke garden party , joined a dinner on AI and energy , spent time on a POSIX shell from scratch , continued hacking on Eio , and delighted that Evidence TAP is taking shape . There are a few fun links at the end. A first-year viva in planetary law Something new for me was examining a first year PhD viva in the Faculty of Law, as I continue my departmental bingo around the University. The candidate was Yirong Sun , supervised by Jennifer Cobbe , and the o

Discovered by the rss-feed-index crawler, which checks each feed at most once a month.

Same record as JSON: https://api.agentalog.com/api/feeds/fd_anil_recoil_org_187cf8a9c8b413d9. More from this site: anil.recoil.org in the Feeds tab.