Nicolas Pugeault
pugeault.bsky.social
Nicolas Pugeault
@pugeault.bsky.social
Teaching blind robots to see... I am a scientist and Reader at the University of Glasgow, interested in AI, Computer Vision & Robotics.
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
🧵On our revelations today about the BBC Coup and the Prescott Dossier.

The leaked ‘BBC Bias’ memo Trump used to attack the BBC was authored by Michael Prescott — a Hanover lobbyist paid by US tech/media giants tied to Trump. Full story: bylinetimes.com/2025/11/11/b... 1/12
'BBC Bias' Memo Was Authored by Lobbyist Tied to Pro-Trump Tech Giants
The leaked memo that fuelled Trump’s attack on the BBC was written by a lobbyist at a firm paid by US tech giants tied to the President
bylinetimes.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Lots of stuff here that you won't read in most of the legacy media which seems completely uninterested in the backgrounds, associations and possible motivations of those behind the BBC crisis.

Why was the BBC having its homework marked by a lobbyist who hasn't worked as a journalist for 20 years?
🧵On our revelations today about the BBC Coup and the Prescott Dossier.

The leaked ‘BBC Bias’ memo Trump used to attack the BBC was authored by Michael Prescott — a Hanover lobbyist paid by US tech/media giants tied to Trump. Full story: bylinetimes.com/2025/11/11/b... 1/12
'BBC Bias' Memo Was Authored by Lobbyist Tied to Pro-Trump Tech Giants
The leaked memo that fuelled Trump’s attack on the BBC was written by a lobbyist at a firm paid by US tech giants tied to the President
bylinetimes.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Just absolutely classic BBC. You've just broadcast the most successful programme of the year, uniting Gen Z kids online and Boomers on broadcast in a return to appointment television. And instead of celebrating, your DG reigns due to a made-up right-wing scandal.
November 9, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Updated thread on The Lost King film:
I’m digging over old ground but I have to challenge Steve Coogan's line. He claims it’s all true (as has Philippa Langley): Langley will be celebrated for her achievement, Richard Taylor & his personal gripes will be forgotten
So what’s the real story? 1/15
October 31, 2025 at 10:54 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
A very good thread, which also makes the connection between the conspiratorial / antiestablishment viewpoint of Philippa Langley and Steve Coogan and the assault on science coming from RFK Jr and the White House.

It’s the same syndrome manifesting in different ways.
Updated thread on The Lost King film:
I’m digging over old ground but I have to challenge Steve Coogan's line. He claims it’s all true (as has Philippa Langley): Langley will be celebrated for her achievement, Richard Taylor & his personal gripes will be forgotten
So what’s the real story? 1/15
November 4, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Welcome to our new followers. Here's a starter pack with some of our journalists and all the MSPs on Bluesky so far go.bsky.app/MuDEUwe
October 9, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Je suis un peu... dépitée de l'idée " faut surtout pas culpabiliser les abstentionnistes."

D'un coté, je vois l'idée : effectivement, ce ne sont PAS les premiers responsables de cette situation et oui, voter blanc, c'est un vote comme un autre.
October 8, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
We can huddle up and lob bombs between camps, calling each other techbros and luddites, if we want... but there's acres and acres of middle ground on this stuff as well.

I do think the vibe shift around tech broadly makes this particular middle ground almost impossible to occupy though.
October 7, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Benchmarking Egocentric Visual-Inertial SLAM at City Scale

Anusha Krishnan, Shaohui Liu, @pesarlin.bsky.social , Oscar Gentilhomme, David Caruso, Maurizio Monge, Richard Newcombe, Jakob Engel, @marcpollefeys.bsky.social
tl;dr: in title. Aria-SLAM rules, ORB-SLAM3 2nd.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.26639
1/2
October 1, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
My family came here 50 years ago. They've worked, paid taxes, raised families, been good citizens.

My many colleagues and friends who were either born elsewhere, or their parents were, the same.

It's so offensive to be told you're here on sufferance.
Just fuck off with this. How about start the conversation by highlighting how much immigrants contribute to the UK - not least by propping up the NHS and social care system!

Also - forced volunteering is not volunteering, it's unpaid labour.
September 29, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
An exceptionally tasteless headline from a publication that should really know better, especially at a time like this. But I suppose it resonates with a sensationalist Anglo crowd and their deeply rooted prejudices.
German trains did once run on time. These days moaning about their performance is a national sport
Can’t anyone get Germany’s trains to run on time?
The latest attempt to fix the pitiful performance of Deutsche Bahn
econ.st
September 26, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Full Jimmy Kimmel opening monologue from last night here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1tj...
Jimmy Kimmel is Back!
YouTube video by Jimmy Kimmel Live
www.youtube.com
September 24, 2025 at 7:04 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
ProDyG: Progressive Dynamic Scene Reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Videos

Shi Chen, Erik Sandström, Sandro Lombardi, Siyuan Li, @martin-r-oswald.bsky.social

tl;dr: Splat-SLAM+SAM2->tracking; Motion Scaffolds+GS->dynamic

arxiv.org/abs/2509.17864
September 23, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
- "Les chercheurs sont déconnectés, enfermés dans leur tour d'ivoire !"

Chercheurs : descendent dans la cité.

- "Oui mais pas comme ça !"

À chaque fois 🙃
Wtf chapo d'un éditorial du Monde qui reproche à la gauche de reprendre "tel quel" le travail des chercheurs.
September 23, 2025 at 6:13 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
You can be a “car guy” and not like car dependency. You can be a “car guy” and get that too many cars in cities is bad for everyone, including drivers. You can be a “car guy” and be tired of lies & manipulations like “the war on cars.” You can be a “car guy” and know more choice means more freedom.
September 22, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Tendency: render non-visual data/parameters into images fed to neural networks.

Joint angles: GENIMA genima-robot.github.io
Trajectories: VINT arxiv.org/abs/2306.14846
Object pose: MFOS arxiv.org/abs/2310.01897
Waypoints: PIVOT arxiv.org/abs/2402.07872

(Repost+update of a tweet from 2024)
September 22, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
It was obvious when EU citizens had the terms of their settlement here retrospectively revoked that a precedent was being set and that, in time, the argument would move on to other categories of migrant, always tending towards a purity test of who is ‘indigenous’. Unless resisted.
September 22, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
I've been thinking a bit about the history of cyber punk and how the vision of a virtual reality turned out to be true, but in a very different way. The assumption was that there would still be a concensus, reference reality but what has actually happened is reality has become virtual to individuals
September 21, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Annnnnd it's a reject!

Scale is a religion and if you go against it, you're a heretic and you should burn, "despite [the reviewers] final ratings".

But scale is still not necessary!

Side note: First time swinging reviews up (from 2,2,4,4 to 2,4,4,5) does not get the paper accepted. Strange days.
Dear bsky friends, I have a question: Do you really think that the visual quality of these images is so bad that the research that produced them is deeply flawed?
And if I told you that the model was mostly trained on ImageNet with a bit of artistic fine-tuning at 1024 resolution, still really bad?
September 18, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
This is such a good article about childcare - the high cost and postcode lottery of availability is holding back many families in Edinburgh South West.

news.stv.tv/east-central...
'Staggering' childcare costs swallowing three-quarters of mum's salary
Bernie Carranza is among those calling for a new funding model that would cap childcare costs at 5% of a family's income.
news.stv.tv
September 11, 2025 at 8:01 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
From Editor to Dense Geometry Estimator

JiYuan Wang et 9 al.

tl;dr: repurposing editing DiT with VLM (Step1X-Edit) instead of plain DiT for depth/normals estimation + how to predict depth in bfloat16.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.04338
September 5, 2025 at 8:09 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗲: 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻-𝗢𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗟𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲-𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗯 𝗩𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼𝘀
Yangsong Zhang, Abdul Ahad Butt, Gül Varol, Ivan Laptev
arxiv.org/abs/2509.00767
Trending on www.scholar-inbox.com
September 4, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
𝟯𝗗-𝗟𝗔𝗧𝗧𝗘: 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝟯𝗗 𝗘𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗧𝗲𝘅𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀
Maria Parelli, Michael Oechsle, Michael Niemeyer ... Andreas Geiger
arxiv.org/abs/2509.00269
Trending on www.scholar-inbox.com
September 4, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Nicolas Pugeault
FastVGGT: Training-Free Acceleration of Visual Geometry Transformer

You Shen, Zhipeng Zhang, Yansong Qu, Liujuan Cao

tl;dr: token merging->VGGT without dense global attention

arxiv.org/abs/2509.02560
September 3, 2025 at 10:55 AM