Mirco Musolesi
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mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi
@mircomusolesi.bsky.social
120 followers 150 following 58 posts

Professor of Computer Science. Machine Intelligence Lab, UCL AI Centre, Department of Computer Science, University College London.

Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Computing | Books

https://www.mircomusolesi.org .. more

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Computer science 51%
Physics 21%
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mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 9h
This blogpost by Cal Newport is pretty good: "Forget Chatbots You Need a Notebook". calnewport.com/forget-chatb...
Forget Chatbots. You Need a Notebook. - Cal Newport
Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife ... Read more
calnewport.com

Reposted by Mirco Musolesi, Robert J. Geller, Daniel W. Drezner

xkcd.com
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 9h
Earthquake Prediction Flowchart

xkcd.com/3165/
Comic. Someone is claiming to predict the exact date of a future earthquake. Should you listen? [flowchart: start] → NO (There are big earthquakes constantly, so if anyone ever *does* figure this out, it will be immediately obvious that their method works and then the world’s seismologists will not shut up about it. You won’t need this flowchart.)

Reposted by Mirco Musolesi

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 5d
In fact, these look like insects and maybe they look like that to attract predators that will be able to spread them elsewhere. I would be very interested in an opinion from an expert. 2/2

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 5d
More wonders of the natural world. Now some flowers of the plant in my office appear as if suspended in the void. This looks like a “technique” to invite pollinators. Or maybe it is a self-pollinating plant and these flowers contain seeds (?). 1/2

Reposted by Mirco Musolesi

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 11d
The Singularity is Not Near.

Reposted by Mirco Musolesi, Michael A. Shook, Donat Agosti

Reposted by Mirco Musolesi, Jack Stilgoe

xkcd.com
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 14d
Continents

xkcd.com/3159/
Comic. [two connected spacecraft hovering in space above the Earth] Houston, the view is superb. We can see the continents spread out below us, right where they’ve been since the Earth formed. [caption] I still can’t believe we developed spaceflight before we figured out that the continents moved.

Reposted by Mirco Musolesi

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 20d
Link to the source: www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5...
www.bbc.co.uk

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 20d
And, by the way, regarding the value of a Computer Science degree in the "vibe-coding" era: one thing you learn in a good CS programme is how to design and build systems that are resilient and fault-tolerant. 2/2

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 20d
Re the AWS outage, it’s quite cool that the BBC interviewed Ken Birman, who knows a thing or two about distributed systems. 1/2

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 25d
We received the ACM UbiComp 2025 10-Year Impact Award for our paper “Trajectories of Depression: Unobtrusive Monitoring of Depressive States by means of Smartphone Mobility Traces Analysis” co-authored with the great Luca Canzian. Paper here: www.mircomusolesi.org/papers/ubico... #ubicomp2025

Reposted by Loretta Lees, Colin F. Camerer, Mirco Musolesi , and 4 more

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · 26d
New preprint with Charles Westphal and Stephen Hailes: "A Generalized Information Bottleneck Theory of Deep Learning". In this work, we introduce the Generalized Information Bottleneck framework, a synergy-based reformulation of the Information Bottleneck theory. arxiv.org/abs/2509.26327

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · Oct 10
Lots of headlines claim graduates are more likely to be unemployed than non-graduates. Graduate unemployment panic makes good headlines, but the data says otherwise. Great analysis by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com. www.ft.com/content/ea9e...

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What the graduate unemployment story gets wrong
People with a degree are faring better, not worse than their non-graduate counterparts
www.ft.com

mircomusolesi.bsky.social
Mirco Musolesi @mircomusolesi.bsky.social · Oct 8
New preprint: “Complexity-Driven Policy Optimization”. The paper discusses a novel complexity-driven policy optimisation solution for efficient and robust approximation in Reinforcement Learning. Essentially, entropy alone is not sufficient, we also need "structure".
gfranceschelli.bsky.social gfranceschelli.bsky.social @gfranceschelli.bsky.social · Oct 8
📢 New Paper!

We replace the entropy bonus in PPO with a *complexity* bonus, encouraging structured and stochastic policies that are robust to different scaling factors and can work in environments with variable exploration needs.

Read more:
arxiv.org/abs/2509.20509

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Complexity-Driven Policy Optimization
Policy gradient methods often balance exploitation and exploration via entropy maximization. However, maximizing entropy pushes the policy towards a uniform random distribution, which represents an un...
arxiv.org