We're pleased to announce the Summerschool 'Multiscale Social Dynamics in Individuals and Groups' (MDIG2026) at MindLabs, Tilburg, NL - 13-17 July 2026. You can register here for a 5-day in-person summer school at Tilburg University, Research Center for Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, from July 13th-17th (monday to friday), with the theme Multiscale Social Dynamics in Individuals and Groups (MDIG2026). This summer school supported by EnvisionBox.org will feature hands-on tutorials on analysis pipelines from computer science and complexity science, including methods for motion tracking, kinematic and acoustic analysis, empirical mode decomposition, windowed multiscale synchrony analysis, and related approaches. Rather than focusing on a single modality, we will cover several aspects of multimodal communication, including visual, prosodic, and movement-based signals, and examine how these interact across multiple temporal and spatial scales. One dedicated day will focus on methods for data management, masking and anonymizing audiovisual data to ensure privacy protection and GDPR compliance. In addition, participants will work in groups on applied projects throughout the week, culminating in presentations of project progress at the end of the summer school. The goal of the summer school is twofold: first, to familiarize participants with state-of-the-art tools, open solutions, and datasets for multiscale social signal analysis, and second, to critically examine their limitations. By the end of the week, participants will have gained practical skills, new analytical tools, and a deeper understanding of how these methods can be improved to advance research in multimodal behavioral dynamics. Location The Netherlands, MindLabs Tilburg University Fee 125 euros person that includes a 5-day summer school featuring lectures and hands on tutorials and working groups with lunches, coffee breaks, and one social dinner provided (budget permitting). Travel grant …

Summerschool 13-17 July Multiscale Social Dynamics at MindLabs NL - Sign ups are open!

Glasgow Central Fire Sparks Travel Chaos Across the UK A major fire beside Glasgow Central has shut Scotland’s busiest station, triggering nationwide disruption and raising urgent questions over UK rail resilience.

Awful news about Glasgow Central, I'm still hoping the station itself escaped serious damage.
But while we're here, can anyone spot the problem with the news photo below, from thetraveler.org/glasgow-cent...?
We've really got to STOP using AI to fake things.

Snail Sex Tape Snails do it, we watch.

This is such a bucket list moment: I'm on the mother of all science podcasts, @radiolab.bsky.social!

It was so nice to be interviewed by #MollyWebster and fact-checked by #DianeKelly on snail reproduction (incl. the love dart work by @joriskoene.bsky.social).

www.wnycstudios.org/story/snail-...

Lovely clear Buzzard calling yesterday. Grabbed my phone. Yep, I thought it was a Buzzard, Merlin thought it was a Buzzard. Fabrizio listened back to my recording and said “Nice Buzzard”.
I saw the bird.
It was a Jay.
Brilliant mimicry though!
Thought you'd approve @wascherclaudia.bsky.social

Call for abstract submissions!

The Emerging Bioacousticians' Days are returning for their fourth edition in Besançon from 16 to 18 June 2026, and they are actively seeking presenters!

Abstract submissions are open until 3 April 2026 via this link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F....

Automatic detection for bioacoustic research: a practical guide from and for biologists and computer scientists Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in the use of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for biological and ecological applications, and a corresponding increase in the volume of data generated. Howeve...

Thanks & hi! Yes... the article raises a real issue, that "transferability" to new situations isn't guaranteed. But solutions exist; it's no crisis. We do a lot of work to measure how "generalisable" (in our words) those tools really are. Here's a recent handbook (for sound) doi.org/10.1111/brv....

Torus embeddings Many data representations are vectors of continuous values. In particular, deep learning embeddings are data-driven representations, typically either unconstrained in Euclidean space, or constrained to a hypersphere. These may also be translated into integer representations (quantised) for efficient large-scale use. However, the fundamental (and most efficient) numeric representation in the overwhelming majority of existing computers is integers with overflow -- and vectors of these integers do not correspond to either of these spaces, but instead to the topology of a (hyper)torus. This mismatch can lead to wasted representation capacity. Here we show that common deep learning frameworks can be adapted, quite simply, to create representations with inherent toroidal topology. We investigate two alternative strategies, demonstrating that a normalisation-based strategy leads to training with desirable stability and performance properties, comparable to a standard hyperspherical L2 normalisation. We also demonstrate that a torus embedding maintains desirable quantisation properties. The torus embedding does not outperform hypersphere embeddings in general, but is comparable, and opens the possibility to train deep embeddings which have an extremely simple pathway to efficient `TinyML' embedded implementation.

New from me: "Torus embeddings" - a topological exploration in deep learning and CPUs https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03135 #preprint #deeplearning #topology

Grass, trees, a little lake, a bench to sit on...

Tilburg University campus is pretty lovely, on the first springlike day of the year. Soundtrack is blackbirds, goldcrest. Also, it's my 5th anniversary working here. #tilburg

Am I still dreaming? Nope. We absolutely smashed this 💚💚💚💚

Got to say CONGRATULATIONS TO MY GREEN FRIENDS IN MANCHESTER! Happy news! Always remember that good parties do win! (even when the press gets obsessed with the xenophobes) The first ever Green MP in Northern England, hurrah! […]

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context*

Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when

An LLM just generates text

Congratulations to Shubhr Singh, who just passed his #PhD on "Graph neural networks for audio analysis"! (at QMUL, London, co-supervised by me while I was there) https://shubhrsingh22.github.io/ #GNN

for me, all such thoughts lead to This Is My Jam. we had it! (it died due to big platforms hating the open web lifehacker.com/music-site-t... )

On the topic of bug-fixing: "It took 15 years for anyone to notice errors in the ubiquitous BLOSUM62 amino acid substitution matrix used for protein sequence alignment". Even weirder, this bug makes the results better. https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0308-274 #softwarecarpentry #bugs […]

I want applicants to understand that AI cover letters make their applications significantly more likely to get rejected. When your answer is verbatim what I got from 100 other people, it means I know nothing about you, your writing skill, or your actual work. I can only go off a scan of your resume.

Assistant/Associate/Full Professor Computational Biology Key responsibilities The Faculty of Science, Institute of Biology (IBL), is looking for candidates for a position as Assistant / Associate / Full Professor in Quantitative and Computational Biology or Bioinformatics in line with one or more of the leading the…

Leiden University is recruiting an Assistant/Associate/Full Professor Computational Biology https://www.academictransfer.com/en/jobs/358702/assistantassociatefull-professor-computational-biology/ #academicjobs

Our paper finally came out! Super excited about this paper - we applied NLP to #ebird, @xeno-canto.bsky.social and @inaturalist.bsky.social text comments to find hundreds of newly documented mimicry events for these cute jays.

#ornithology #publication #academia

Stay Home, by American Football from the album American Football

and @tjwiltshire.bsky.social added this one: americanfootball.bandcamp.com/track/stay-h... #in7

Figure 1 from the report, showing that "traditional AI" is where the climate benefit claims come from, while "consumer generative AI" is where the huge energy consumption occurs

This report by @ketan is excellent. It's extremely valuable to make a clear difference between which "AI" has a huge environmental cost, and which "AI" is expected to give climate benefits. I research in this area! Great to have this documented […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

People are saying this is the greatest ever 7/4 time playlist

youtube.com/playlist?lis...

s/o to @neuroclef.bsky.social @danstowell.bsky.social for introducing me to good groups I didn't know

& the person who replied w/a Sting song then deleted, my deep state gangstalker loves 7/4 I guess

In the Netherlands we're very lucky to have a "sovereign" payments system. It's called iDEAL en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL It must really have helped those ICC judges when they got frozen out of Visa and Mastercard

This #PhilTransB issue showcases cutting-edge advancements in the fields of DNA sequencing, computer vision, acoustic monitoring, and radar for use in insect #biodiversity monitoring: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Alternative science careers in the nonprofit sector — Wild Animal Initiative With universities and federal science agencies facing upheaval and instability, scientific nonprofits offer a secure and mission-driven alternative career path for researchers and support staff.

This is a time of upheaval in the scientific community.

If you’re looking for ways to stay on track in your scientific career without relying on opportunities in government or academia, here are some ideas — including a role that’s open right now at Wild Animal Initiative.

Try asking for vinegar in a Berlin chippy and then tell me how European you feel

... yes, in scope :-) News in a week or two.

Europeans will never understand this

... let's sonify this again: xeno-canto.org/collection/s...

It's OK as a shorthand, but since I had a former life as a programmer of generative music/art I officially must protest ;) I spent weeks/months coding systems, the most successful of which I've probably heard many months of output from. Just as we can enjoy the Mandelbrot set for decades...

Entrance to the Padua Botanical Garden, the oldest scientific botanical garden in the world! With a sign for "Complex objects, different perspectives: Studying and digitising cecidological collections". The sign has a picture of preserved historical plant galls.

Interior of the historical botanical collections at the University of Padua. Tall wooden cabinets are filled with bundles of herbarium specimens.

A close up of an old herbarium specimen on a wooden table. Gloved hands are holding open some folded paper, revealing the preserved galls within.

An informational sign from inside the Botanical Museum of the University of Padua, with a biography of Silvia Zenari in Italian and English. She is described as "una botanica del Novecento" (a 20th century female botanist). Below the sign are some herbarium specimens from her collection.

On this International Day of Women & Girls in Science, I'm headed home from an amazing gall workshop at the Botanical Museum of the University of Padua. Grateful for all the mentors and colleagues who've treated me with dignity and respect. I would not be here without them!

Sundials, by Django Django from the album Marble Skies

Django Django - "Sundials" djangodjango.bandcamp.com/track/sundials #in7