Thijs van der Plas
@vdplasthijs.bsky.social
Post-doc (AI for monitoring ecosystems) @ AI group, WUR. Previously Oxford DPhil, The Alan Turing Institute & Peak District NP. vdplasthijs.github.io
arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2504.03603
Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language
Multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) integrates diverse types of data via machine learning to improve understanding, prediction, and decision-making across disciplines such as healthcare, science, ...
arxiv.org
October 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2504.03603
View-only: rdcu.be/eL0JC
Towards deployment-centric multimodal AI beyond vision and language
Nature Machine Intelligence - Multimodal AI combines different types of data to improve decision-making in fields such as healthcare and engineering, but work so far has focused on vision and...
rdcu.be
October 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
View-only: rdcu.be/eL0JC
This was a lot of fun to work on -- big thanks to everyone involved and particularly Xianyuan Liu and Haiping Lu for leading this effort!
October 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
This was a lot of fun to work on -- big thanks to everyone involved and particularly Xianyuan Liu and Haiping Lu for leading this effort!
Many great scientific challenges are both multimodal and multidisciplinary. In our perspective we discuss the additional challenges this brings for developing deployable AI, and provide recommendations to address these challenges early on.
October 22, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Many great scientific challenges are both multimodal and multidisciplinary. In our perspective we discuss the additional challenges this brings for developing deployable AI, and provide recommendations to address these challenges early on.
Paper: doi.org/10.1007/978-... [4/5]
Flexible Metadata Harvesting for Ecology Using Large Language Models
Large, open datasets can accelerate ecological research, particularly by enabling researchers to develop new insights by reusing datasets from multiple sources. However, to find the most suitable datasets to combine and integrate, researchers must navigate diverse...
doi.org
October 7, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Paper: doi.org/10.1007/978-... [4/5]
We presented our tool at the recent EcoDL workshop at TPDL2025, and our paper and code are now both available open-access at the links below! Big thanks to the rest of the team, and please let us know any thoughts and suggestions as we continue to develop this tool! [3/5]
October 7, 2025 at 11:47 AM
We presented our tool at the recent EcoDL workshop at TPDL2025, and our paper and code are now both available open-access at the links below! Big thanks to the rest of the team, and please let us know any thoughts and suggestions as we continue to develop this tool! [3/5]
In a nutshell, we successfully used LLMs to flexibly extract and convert metadata of ecological datasets (e.g., by scraping datasets webpages), with equal accuracy for both structured and unstructured metadata. [2/5]
October 7, 2025 at 11:47 AM
In a nutshell, we successfully used LLMs to flexibly extract and convert metadata of ecological datasets (e.g., by scraping datasets webpages), with equal accuracy for both structured and unstructured metadata. [2/5]
There is still lots of scope for further improvements; if that's of interest please don't hesitate to get in touch!
June 17, 2025 at 9:57 AM
There is still lots of scope for further improvements; if that's of interest please don't hesitate to get in touch!
We combined sentinel-2 images and UKBMS butterfly occurrence records to predict butterfly species presence from satellite data. We developed a soft contrastive loss that acts as a regulariser and improves prediction accuracy.
June 17, 2025 at 9:57 AM
We combined sentinel-2 images and UKBMS butterfly occurrence records to predict butterfly species presence from satellite data. We developed a soft contrastive loss that acts as a regulariser and improves prediction accuracy.
May 20, 2025 at 8:42 AM
Hi, I'm using satellite data to predict species biodiversity! Could I be added please :) Thanks!
November 23, 2024 at 10:29 AM
Hi, I'm using satellite data to predict species biodiversity! Could I be added please :) Thanks!