James Hetherington

I like to think @ucl-arc.bsky.social is an attempt at doing something different: professional service done with academic instincts, research and teaching done by mutually supportive multi skilled teams. The challenge is “impedance matching” with the prevailing PS and academic cultures.

OpenSAFELY news: you can apply to do non-COVID research, from today! | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science We are delighted to announce that - from today - you can submit applications to the OpenSAFELY service for non-COVID-19 studies.

OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c

Now it's over to users!

www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...

I made an embarrassing malapropism while talking to an LLM and now I can’t deal with the asocial anxiety. Help me.

Suppose there are fewer entry level coder jobs because these are done by AI, but we still need more advanced engineers.

In this world “pedagogical programming” : writing software designed primarily to *teach humans* becomes Huge.

This is not yet a model training objective.

Even after explaining why pie charts are bad again and again (documented by lots of research on data viz) people still do them!

Is there a name for the phenomenon whereby management communities are unable to hear scientific advice which is inconvenient?

Eg goodheart’s law to someone who invents a poorly designed new metric

…missing not at random to a person who wants to use survey data with low response to make a decision.

I sort of agree with both of you. Tim what would your preferred term be? “reproducibly auditable”? We can’t prove most simple programmatic automations correct. It’s a matter of degree. Llm based processes harder to build confidence in reproducible auditability, but it’s a continuum of confidence.

James Help James Hetherington raise money to support WWF-UK

I’m running the Hackney half for charity again, this time WWF.

www.justgiving.com/fundraising/...

Fiction: “I have instructed my AI to remove all unnecessary politesse and verbiage from all incoming messages. There will thus be no manipulative value to you in not getting to the point. Just say what you want without the schmooze.”

I argue for relevance to society’s needs. I don’t think student-as-consumer will survive the AI wave.

Delighted to join today’s UCL Policy Lab Roundtable on AI, the future of Work and the Role of the University. There was a broad panel of participants with distinctive & fascinating perspectives. HE mist be relevant to student needs, but what is ‘relevant’ increasingly is difficult to predict

We have funded 10 ambitious Challenge-led Awards through the @UCL Grand Challenge Data Empowered Societies, University College London www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challe...

Do they not do “bringing random things from the supermarket to church day”?

I thought it was Awkwardly Timed Harvest Festival?

This is a classic format. The last time I saw this, the subject was signal-to-noise ratio. It is interesting to consider that math is the signal, and 'magic' is the noise.

At the SC25 trusted research environments BOF. Sadaf Alam presenting our work on Federated Research Infrastructures through Data Governance Extension (FRIDGE). With @bristoluni.bsky.social @ucl-arc.bsky.social Turing Institute and Cambridge

Sorry, I’d misremembered the year of yours when I met this chap. Yep, you’re still champion!

Come to UK Universities booth at #SC25 to find out more about the UK's #DRI programme and pick up some merchandise!

Extremely impressed by what U Illinois have achieved with in house LLM services using their local HPC investments and open source models and tools. This is what I’ve been advocating for UCL and they’ve proved it can be done.

Please visit us later this week at the UK Universities booth to learn more about our research and activities.

It’s fascinating how hard we had to work to get computers to be bad at maths.

Causing this to occur has been an ambition of mine since 2019:

We did it! A joint uk universities booth at Supercomputing! Congrats to the team.

What would you think if offered citizenship of a state? What state would you choose? Would you vote?

What does this do to the role of (public sector in particular) CIO? What changes in the balance of skills and priorities? How do IT org cultures change? I think, not back to the nerdy cottage industry of the 00s but also cannot sustain the tech-clueless mainly-a-consumer culture of 10s and early 20s

What does this do to the moat of platforms like Dynamics or Salesforce vs just doing things with open source libraries? I’m not sure.

Consider especially the work to go from your orgs org model, business processes and culture to a good IT soln, as expressed in configuration and integration of platform solutions, bespoke tweaks to platforms… this is large. Seems likely to be very reducible by LLM as config files to shared base.

Even before LLM, cost of supplier managers, procurement, service and delivery orgs in IT is huge. Nontechnical CIO orgs are not cheap at all, and SaaS costs are very hard to control.

Suppose cost of software does fall 20x because of LLMs. (jury is out, but let’s explore).

What does that do?

It might make bespoke software for each org competitive with platform solutions.

The value of better org-sol fit might be bigger than cost of build.

Makes IT orgs builders not buyers.

Arsenal WFC vs Chelsea. #coyg