Omar Rivasplata
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omarrivasplata.bsky.social
Omar Rivasplata
@omarrivasplata.bsky.social
Manchester Centre for AI FUNdamentals | UoM | Alumn UCL, DeepMind, U Alberta, PUCP | Deep Thinker | Posts/reposts might be non-deep | Carpe espresso ☕
Pinned
Is this starter pack comprehensive?
bsky.app/starter-pack...
Note to self to write short concise emails.

Reason: Long emails tend to create complications. Can be obstacles to effective comms. Even if intended to explain or clarify something, the outcome of a long email can be confusion and complications
December 16, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
We have been working with Michal Klein on pushing a module to train *flow matching* models using JAX. This is shipped as part of our new release of the OTT-JAX toolbox (github.com/ott-jax/ott)

The tutorial to do so is here: ott-jax.readthedocs.io/tutorials/ne...
November 5, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
See you in January 2026 in Abu Dhabi with @yann-lecun.bsky.social
@jpvert.bsky.social, Ivan Laptev, and other friends at Machine Can See!
December 6, 2025 at 11:01 PM
cette marge est trop étroite, monsieur
December 4, 2025 at 10:42 AM
Most decorated expectation I ever saw!
December 3, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Went to Oxford
November 27, 2025 at 9:24 PM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
👋 Meet the ELLIS Board!

This episode features @samikaski.bsky.social, Director of the @ellisinstitute.fi 🇫🇮 & Prof at @aalto.fi 🇫🇮 & @manchester.ac.uk 🇬🇧

He answers rapid-fire questions about the future of #AI and recommends this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.07259

Watch now 👉 youtu.be/ZP7HuurCDIU
Meet the Board: Samuel Kaski (ELLIS Board Member | ELLIS Institute Finland)
YouTube video by ELLIS
youtu.be
November 24, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
🏹 Job alert: Postdocs/research fellows in probabilistic machine learning at @ellisinstitute.fi & Manchester Centre for AI Fundamentals

📍 Helsinki 🇫🇮 & Manchester 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
📅 Apply by Dec 1st
🔗 https://bit.ly/3LEl5Ri
Postdocs/research fellows in probabilistic machine learning
I am hiring to my group in ELLIS Institute Finland and Manchester Centre for AI Fundamentals
bit.ly
November 14, 2025 at 10:16 AM
✍ Earlier this week I was at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, attending the workshop "Bridging Stochastic Control and Reinforcement Learning: Theories and Applications"

🔗 www.newton.ac.uk/event/SCLW01/
Bridging Stochastic Control And Reinforcement Learning: Theories and Applications - Isaac Newton Institute
This workshop aims to bring together experts from diverse fields—including control theory, stochastic analysis, statistics, optimization, machine...
www.newton.ac.uk
November 15, 2025 at 12:16 PM
What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision

Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision
Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.
www.nature.com
November 14, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
🗳️ The results are in!

Meet the 7 newly elected trustees joining our Council in Jan 2026: rss.org.uk/news-publica...

Big congrats to all! 🎉 And thank you to everyone who voted or stood—your voice shapes our future.
Meet Your Newly Elected Council Members
rss.org.uk
November 11, 2025 at 1:00 PM
✨ Looking forward to visiting Finland 🇫🇮 this month for the AI Summit (17 Nov) and the scientific seminar and launch (18 Nov) of the ELLIS Institute Finland
The institute's opening is part of the AI Summit, with distinguished speakers from across European business and government, as well as top researchers and leadership from the @ellis.eu network. An exciting two-day program that marks a milestone for AI & ML research. More info at aisummit.fi
Grand opening of @ellisinstitute.fi will be Nov 17-18: The first day will be a broad-audience AI Summit co-organized with AI Finland and Foundation PS in Turku, and the second day will be an @ellis.eu scientific seminar in Espoo for the invited AI and machine learning community. aisummit.fi
November 1, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Booked my trip to Cambridge for this one
October 31, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Intriguing results of a PhD student experience survey across a number of countries. Brazil and Australia scored high on "satisfaction" and UK didn't fall too far behind. Quality of mentoring reported as very important feature, and so was quality of human connections
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Are these the happiest PhD students in the world?
Brazil, Australia and Italy have the highest satisfaction scores in Nature’s global 2025 PhD survey — but are these nations really the best places to do a doctorate?
www.nature.com
October 26, 2025 at 1:51 PM
Reminder of the preferred approach when sharing arXiv preprint links
October 18, 2025 at 11:33 AM
📢 New preprint alert - This work with collaborators is on Reinforcement Learning + PAC-Bayes for Markov Chain data. Had been in the oven for some months and received feedback from NeurIPS'25. We uploaded the preprint in arXiv for visibility and comments would be welcome!
arxiv.org/abs/2510.10544
PAC-Bayesian Reinforcement Learning Trains Generalizable Policies
We derive a novel PAC-Bayesian generalization bound for reinforcement learning that explicitly accounts for Markov dependencies in the data, through the chain's mixing time. This contributes to overco...
arxiv.org
October 14, 2025 at 12:40 PM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
If you haven't already, there's still time for members to vote in our Council elections and have your say in our future! 🗣️

Meet this year's candidates 👉 rss.org.uk/news-publica...

✉️ Check your email for your personalised voting link.

Voting closes midnight on Sunday 12 October.
Meet the candidates for the 2025 RSS Council elections
rss.org.uk
September 30, 2025 at 9:19 AM
Mathematics Today dropped through the letterbox this morning. Contains a cute piece on quantum computing illustrated with maths topics taught in A-levels (UK school system). Recommendable for those who teach maths to connect with the trendy topic!
ima.org.uk
IMA
The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications is the UK's chartered professional body for mathematicians and one of the UK's learned societies for mathematics.
ima.org.uk
October 4, 2025 at 10:50 AM
TIL The reference for Donsker-Varadhan variational formula is Donsker and Varadhan's "Asymptotic evaluation of certain Markov process expectations for large time-IV" (1983), not the previous parts I, II, III from years 1975 and 1976 that are commonly cited
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Asymptotic evaluation of certain markov process expectations for large time. IV
Click on the article title to read more.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
September 28, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Good Morning!

"All models are wrong, but some are useful.". --George E. P. Box
x.com/probnstat/st...
x.com
September 27, 2025 at 6:05 AM
Reposted by Omar Rivasplata
In 1950, Alan Turing - while at @manchester.ac.uk - proposed a simple but profound experiment: can a machine convincingly imitate human thought?

We now call it the Turing Test. 🧠💻
a man wearing suspenders and a watch looks down in front of a machine
Alt: Alarn Turing looks down in front of a machine
media.tenor.com
September 16, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Greetings from Stockport
September 21, 2025 at 1:30 PM
I have experience with Entropy MDPI
I'm convinced this is a predatory publisher
September 20, 2025 at 6:09 PM
In case everybody didn't notice, the Royal Statistical Society's Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) section now has a bluesky account: @rss-csml.bsky.social
September 15, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Earlier this week attended the Non-Reversible Sampling workshop at Newcastle University. A very nice event!

Thanks to the organisers Sam Power (Bristol), Giorgos Vasdekis (Newcastle) and Andi Wang (Warwick)
sites.google.com/view/probai-...
Newcastle Non-Reversible Sampling Workshop
Topic: This workshop will bring together researchers at the forefront of modern sampling techniques and related disciplines, to discuss recent advances in the field. This event is funded by the ProbA...
sites.google.com
September 11, 2025 at 5:25 PM