Ioana Ciucă
banner
errai34.bsky.social
Ioana Ciucă
@errai34.bsky.social
AI hacker and astronomer @Stanford · Founder & Co-Creator @universetbd.org. You can find my website at www.iciuca.com.
Pinned
“move slowly, grow things”
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
📢 New dataset out!

We introduce HypoGen💥, a dataset of ~5.5K structured problem–hypothesis pairs (Bit–Flip–Spark + Chain‑of‑Reasoning) to advance LLM-driven scientific ideation💡.

Fine‑tuned LLaMA 3.1 8B & R1‑distilled models show significant gains. Humans are still the best🥇.
April 18, 2025 at 5:57 PM
And another banger from the team led by our wondrous Sharaf Zaman 🥳 . So incredibly proud of the team, we're going open, multi-modal and inviting our community so we TBD together. A big shoutout to @mjjsmith.com and @pktrpl.bsky.social for spearheading our open community efforts 🚀 .
Excited to announce our new paper as part of our 2^2 week: AstroLLaVA, a vision language model for astronomy that enables natural dialogue with astronomical imagery! Shout out to Sharaf Zaman for leading this work arxiv.org/abs/2504.08583 🔭☄️
April 16, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
Excited to announce our new paper as part of our 2^2 week: AstroLLaVA, a vision language model for astronomy that enables natural dialogue with astronomical imagery! Shout out to Sharaf Zaman for leading this work arxiv.org/abs/2504.08583 🔭☄️
April 16, 2025 at 12:17 PM
Another banger from the dream team💥 🚀 💫 ! Big congratulations to @atillaalkan.bsky.social and team, who have done tremendous work with hypothesis generation and bringing our community up to speed with the latest advancements 🥳 .
Our 2^2 celebration is still in full swing! 🎉
Today we’re launching our latest, must-read survey paper:
“A Survey on Hypothesis Generation for Scientific Discovery in the Era of Large Language Models.”

Check it out! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.054...
🔭
April 15, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Tremendous work drawing from the inspiring and expansive vision and commitment to excellence with purpose from @astronolan.bsky.social working with the wonderful support of the @universetbd.org team and @msftresearch.bsky.social through the AFMR grant 🥳 .
Our 2^2 celebration continues! 🎉 Today we’re excited to introduce AstroCoder – an AI tool that makes niche astronomy software discoverable, scanning over 2,270+ codebases to deliver technical summaries, installation guides, and code examples.
🚀 Try it now at nolank.ca/astrocoder/
AstroCoder
nolank.ca
April 14, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Trying to connect with a gentler part of myself after a very tough year.
www.iciuca.com/hey-san-fran...
To a city I love
Like no other, San Francisco. Before I met you, I thought London was the one. Rain and ruins and a sense of being close to the home I didn't choose, the one I always go back to on quiet nights when n...
www.iciuca.com
December 27, 2024 at 2:13 AM
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
I was deeply disappointed by the lack of nature/science/climate/enviro on many major end-of-year book lists—so I decided to make my own!

Introducing: ✨🎁📚 The 2024 Holiday Gift Guide to Nature & Science Books ✨🎁📚

Please share: Let's make this go viral in time for Black Friday / holiday shopping!
November 27, 2024 at 7:08 PM
Build a model, it survives a cycle. Build a team, it survives many.
December 8, 2024 at 5:30 AM
Just got all of my furniture under 500 dollars (not counting the mattress). Thrift goddess 😆.
December 5, 2024 at 2:03 AM
On the Wednesdays when I work from home, I like to come here at noon. Saturdays too, Sundays at Embarcadero Pier.

Something about the ocean makes the unquiet rest for a moment.
December 4, 2024 at 7:59 PM
A great joy to see our team members contributing to the open-source MMU Collaboration and Dataset, which got accepted to NeurIPS 2024! Massive thanks to @mjjsmith.com for bringing folks together and inspiring us to take part in this great collaborative project together with many great people! 🚀✨🎉✨
Excited to announce the Multimodal Universe (MMU): a huge 100TB dataset bringing together the largest ML-focused collection of astronomical observations ever assembled to accelerate open AI and astronomy research

github.com/MultimodalUn...

Think ImageNet, but for space 🔭 #astrocode 🧵
December 2, 2024 at 8:37 PM
fluffy neighbor ❤️
November 30, 2024 at 4:36 PM
Incredible work done by @pktrpl.bsky.social and team 🚀✨🎉!
Very nice work on chemistry and materials science foundation models from Nawaf Alampara and team (including our own
@pktrpl.bsky.social 🥳🥳 ) 🧪🧪

Paper link: arxiv.org/abs/2411.16955
November 28, 2024 at 11:47 PM
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
Join us on Discord tomorrow (Nov 28th) at 15:00 UTC for our monthly talk 🔭 🧪 ! @micginolfi.bsky.social (U Florence) will be talking about how we can infer many galaxy properties via a single neural net (nice X thread here with more details: x.com/micginolfi/s...).

Link: discord.gg/9PXcTH7cTn?e...
November 27, 2024 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
One thing everyone can do right now is follow @blackinastro.bsky.social and use and share their official starter pack: go.bsky.app/6nFQdRC 🔭 ⚛️

I know also @blackandstem.bsky.social plans to set up a presence in the coming months! 🧪
November 26, 2024 at 7:42 PM
Lots of love in and for UTBD here where the skies are blue.
Hello world! 🦋
November 25, 2024 at 4:14 PM
New house vibes in San Francisco after three months on the road after leaving Australia at the beginning of September. House appreciation day 🙏.
November 25, 2024 at 4:25 AM
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
Reading the TÜLU 3 paper from @ai2.bsky.social. It's refreshing to see a research lab treating AI as a real science with full reports, data, code, logs, evals.

Paper: allenai.org/papers/tulu-...
Demo: playground.allenai.org
Code: github.com/allenai/open...
Eval: github.com/allenai/olmes

Notes
allenai.org
November 24, 2024 at 6:04 PM
Okay, Bluesky is cool in all the good ways. I’m sold.
November 24, 2024 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Ioana Ciucă
Research into advanced AI reasoning mostly just proves why we all have anxiety

arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14405
November 23, 2024 at 10:42 PM
“move slowly, grow things”
November 24, 2024 at 3:30 AM
Think I'm not going back to formerly Twitter. Loved that place so much, the community, the news, the excitement when someone cool wanted to reach out.

But the vibes are kinda off nowadays. Whatever they've done to it, it's not the same. The transition tho.
November 24, 2024 at 3:06 AM
hello world
April 23, 2024 at 1:30 PM