“Give them something to like, and then they’ll do the work required to understand it. People are smart when they’re interested in something.”

Quick Summary

Not much to report for this month. We finalised historic predictions for the Gaza Strip tent detection model and turned them over to Forensic Arcticture.

AGF student projects have been running well and increasingly independently. Progress has been made on developing models to improve the ACLED conflict predictions and housing model simulations. We’re also kicking off development of BioScanCast, a tool to assist pandemic surveillance through LLM-assisted webscraping. Will likely talk more on this later.

Google released some flood data, extracted from digitalised news sources by Gemini (“Groundsource”). I am personally skeptical that this is high quality data, and have done some preliminary comparisons with the South Sudan MODIS inundation maps to further explore this.

It seems that Groundsource is relying exclusively on admin boundaries to draw the flood polygons.

Not a great look, especially given that groups are already integrating this data into models to predict floods (as in, using the Groundsource data as a target). If the Groundsource data is truly garbage, these predictions will be too.

DPhil

Trecking along on the DPhil work alongside AGF commitments. The current plan is to develop improved benchmarking methods for out-of-sample forecasting, benchmark a bunch of spatio-temporal models, then use the results to build new architectures that are more robust to distribution shifts.

Already jumping ahead to the third of those tasks, adapting DeepRV (a GP emulator) for spatio-temporal tasks.

Some ideas currently workshopping.

Also got to meet one of the Rotarians in Oxford, part of the Rotary foundation that will be funding my DPhil work next year.

They bought me food!

Outside of Work

(Finally) got my Ocean Diver certification after a very long weekend diving in a 5°C mud pit in Wraysbury.

My drysuit was too big so I had the pleasure of feeling my suit slowly fill with near-freezing mud water every time I (not pictured) dived.

Also did a spring hike in Cotswalds.

Photoshopped everyone into the same photo.