Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org
- Pronouns
- he/him
Senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE).
Undergraduate Programme Coordinator, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python.
My research is focused on how #heterogeneous behaviour in #pituitary (and other) cells shapes their function as a population.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.
Joined Oct 2022
@CellySally @steveroyle Blocking time for those is super easy. Sticking to that plan... a bit more complicated!
Nicola Romanò
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"Benchpress" would be a good name for a #LifeOfPI blog, so #Albumsx3ThemePaper for Tuesday will be a blog post, added to my reading list only this morning
The author Terry McGlynn notes we use our calendars to mark out time for meetings & teaching but not for reading, thinking, planning, writing, reviewing.......
Trying to block out time for these things highlights the unfeasibility of our workloads
Terry suggests solutions.
tl;dr: it ain't easy.
Nicola Romanò
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My only comment on Gemini is that y'all take everything seriously when it offends white people when we've been yelling about issues for how long and when has a product ever been pulled and when has there ever been this type of shock and media attention?
Nicola Romanò
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It's such a pleasure when I get to ask a former PhD student for help on a current project—because it's an area that she knows better than I do.
In other words, I succeeded when she was my student.
@kofanchen This is a very good idea. The specific nature of this particular assessment might make it a tad difficult to implement but I can think of other use cases for sure! Thank you!
Nicola Romanò
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The CEO of Exxon just said "we've waited too long" to tackle climate change. He blames "society" and "activists" from keeping Exxon from working on this.
Yes, Exxon. Yes, Exxon. Yes, Exxon: the corporation that for decades has been spending millions to slow progress on climate change, despite its own research showing the problem was urgent.
He said:
"We've waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions.... Frankly, society, and the activist — the dominant voice in this discussion — has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
What the fuck is this — some sort of dark and twisted joke?
The interview is here:
https://www.salon.com/2024/02/29/exxon-ceo-to-world-climate-isnt-our-fault-now-pay-the-price/
Nicola Romanò
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Are you interested in cell #heterogeneity ? Would you like to work on understanding how single, heterogeneous cells work together to generate coordinated population responses using a mix of bioinformatics, wet-lab experiments and mathematical modelling?
Then come and do a PhD with us in sunny* Edinburgh!
This PhD programme will also enable you to develop your #teaching skills by participating in teaching activities at our joint institute in Haining, China to eventually work towards a fellowship from the Higher Education Academy!
Any questions just drop me a message and I'll be happy to clarify any doubts!
*well, today at least
@jonny @joss If I could boost this multiple times I would. I've seen institutions and grant/job applications specifically asking for IF of papers and/or asking for 'x papers with IF>y' as a tenure/promotion requirement. I have even heard 'too bad you published in <very decent and actually quite famous journal>, it would have been better not to have that on your CV. This is (part of) what drives bad science and often it's driven by entitled people who don't realise they got lots of high IF papers because they come from 'big name's laboratories that have the political power to publish anything wherever they want.
I think we all know too many examples of very shaky science published in big journals...
Nicola Romanò
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Apparently #Clarivate's Web of Science, one of the major proprietary indexes that employers use to determine whether papers in a journal can be considered in tenure & promotion decisions, denied @joss 's request to be indexed without even telling us. This is not the first time JOSS has been rejected
I checked their "objective review criteria" and JOSS easily passes all the qualifications.
Speaking strictly as my own opinion, not in my role as a JOSS editor or reviewer, but as a matter of fact these indexers are a fucking racket.
Nicola Romanò
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Registration for posit::conf(2024) is now open: https://posit.co/conference/. It's going to be in Seattle, Aug 12-14, and we've tried really hard to make it more affordable this year, so I hope I can you see there in person! (We'll also have a virtual option; more on that soon)
Nicola Romanò
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if you remember using a cracked copy of nero to burn other cracked software onto cd, remember to do your gentle back stretches today
@ChristosArgyrop and, I don't mean to imply that LLMs are useless. they can be useful and research in that area has really made impressive steps... it's just that now as more people use them, the hype is starting to give in to reality!
Nicola Romanò
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@nicolaromano These are great points. The difference is that sold engines were marketed as user driven tools, while LLMs as marketed to hype driven fools.
Nicola Romanò
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@BorisBarbour Interesting stuff! This highlights why it's so important to include the versions of all the software used for analysis. I find it so frustrating that this does not seem to be the standard across the board.
Even more egregious, some researchers don't even version their own code. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to convince them that this is critical. It's crazy to me!
@ChristosArgyrop I'm far from being an expert and very happy to be corrected on this... I think the main issue with this type of benchmarks is that whichever you look at will somehow be skewed.
Yes, <your favourite LLM here> can pass the bar exam, get an accreditation for becoming an airline pilot and create Michelin Star winning recipes... all while also being able to be convinced that 2 + 2 = 5.
Given that LLMs are tools, they also need a skilled person to use them. The AI industry loves telling us that you can ask anything to an LLM and you'll get perfect results, 99.9% of time. They forgot to mention you need to know how/what to ask, which means that with good domain knowledge you can create prompts where these tools fail miserably.
This is the same as using a search engine. If you don't know what to ask you will get irrelevant results. And if you don't have the critical skills to understand whether a reply is relevant or not... you will believe whatever you read.
Nicola Romanò
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Here is a quick #tutorial on how to build a #NeuralNetwork from scratch using #NumPy:
🌍 https://www.fabriziomusacchio.com/blog/2024-02-25-ann_from_scratch_using_numpy/
Politics
@GottaLaff @atrupar These are the same tactics that Berlusconi used in Italy during his time. Normalize what used to be shocking. Make people focus on some of his shocking acts (underage sex parties, for which I know some part of the population was actually sickly proud of him) to distract from the larger criminal scheme he was undertaking. All of this while paving the way for the fascist party that is in power at the moment, and leaving behind a trail of bigotry, misogyny, and corruption.
Nicola Romanò
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I never want to get to a point where I have to turn down random meetings with people asking for help with stuff. I take a meeting or two a week thats just like "how do I do this thing" or "how are you thinking about this" and they are often my favorite part of the (work) week. I have seen people on here host "open office hours" in a more structured way where they set aside an hour or two just for helping ppl with stuff, and I love that.
Thats one of those big hidden harms of overworked profs having to tend grants all the time, all that accumulated wisdom and no time to share it.
Nicola Romanò
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This is the single best article on color spaces I have seen around. Well written, well informed and illustrated with interactive visualizations.
If you only read one, this should be it. Truly brilliant work @eeeps!
- Pronouns
- he/him
Senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and Zhejiang-Edinburgh Joint Institute (ZJE).
Undergraduate Programme Coordinator, Biomedical Informatics at ZJE.
I teach #imageanalysis & #dataanalysis with #RStats & #python.
My research is focused on how #heterogeneous behaviour in #pituitary (and other) cells shapes their function as a population.
I'm also very interested in #reproducibility and #openscience.
Joined Oct 2022
