Tootfinder

The Turing Humanities and Data Science group produced white papers,* collaborations and friendships.
Come celebrate our work at 'Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration' in Oxford/online, 25 Sept 16:00 to 18:30 BST https://

Network power: the humanities and data science in collaboration

Can art enhance your life? Here’s what I learned from Ali Smith, Tracey Emin, Claudia Winkleman and more https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/nov/10/…

Decentralized Online Riemannian Optimization Beyond Hadamard Manifolds
Emre Sahinoglu, Shahin Shahrampour
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07779 https://arxiv.or…

Decentralized Online Riemannian Optimization Beyond Hadamard Manifolds
We study decentralized online Riemannian optimization over manifolds with possibly positive curvature, going beyond the Hadamard manifold setting. Decentralized optimization techniques rely on a consensus step that is well understood in Euclidean spaces because of their linearity. However, in positively curved Riemannian spaces, a main technical challenge is that geodesic distances may not induce a globally convex structure. In this work, we first analyze a curvature-aware Riemannian consensus …

RE: https://mastodon.online/@BrentToderian/115512191968527981
Bring back urban spaces where buildings don't tower over you, making you feel small and inconsequential. Max 5 storey courtyard blocks. Small stores, not super stores.

This could be the start of a script for a Seinfeld-like show updated to 2025...
“I was still charged for that session, Jerry!” <laugh track>

Robust Radar SLAM for Vehicle Parking Applications
Luis Diener, Jens Kalkkuhl, Markus Enzweiler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07683 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509…

Robust Radar SLAM for Vehicle Parking Applications
We address ego-motion estimation for automated parking, where centimeter-level accuracy is crucial due to tight spaces and nearby obstacles. Traditional methods using inertial-measurement units and wheel encoders require calibration, making them costly and time-consuming. To overcome this, we propose a radar-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach that leverages the robustness of radar to adverse weather and support for online calibration. Our robocentric formulation fuses f…

Help me, extended social brain! I saw a simple diagram online that showed technologies going from bespoke to platforms, then maybe to services with one other aspect, but I can't find it again. Does that ring a bell? And no, it's not the hype cycle.

Prototyping Digital Social Spaces through Metaphor-Driven Design: Translating Spatial Concepts into an Interactive Social Simulation
Yoojin Hong, Martina Di Paola, Braahmi Padmakumar, Hwi Joon Lee, Mahnoor Shafiq, Joseph Seering
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02759

Prototyping Digital Social Spaces through Metaphor-Driven Design: Translating Spatial Concepts into an Interactive Social Simulation
Social media platforms are central to communication, yet their designs remain narrowly focused on engagement and scale. While researchers have proposed alternative visions for online spaces, these ideas are difficult to prototype within platform constraints. In this paper, we introduce a metaphor-driven system to help users imagine and explore new social media environments. The system translates users' metaphors into structured sets of platform features and generates interactive simulations pop…

Historically, it makes sense that absurdism is the logical reaction to a climate of oppression and hostility. Dada and Bauhaus for WW I, the "theatre of the absurd" (Esslin) for WW II, or anti-Vietnam war happenings in the 60s.
Somewhat surprisingly, it seems that this role of absurdist relief has today fallen to Tim Robinson and his sketch comedy show "I think you should leave", and the online community around it.
The protagonists change from sketch to sketch…

AI Eyes on the Road: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Traffic Surveillance
Ziming Wang, Shiwei Yang, Rebecca Currano, Morten Fjeld, David Sirkin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06480 h…

AI Eyes on the Road: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Traffic Surveillance
AI-powered road surveillance systems are increasingly proposed to monitor infractions such as speeding, phone use, and jaywalking. While these systems promise to enhance safety by discouraging dangerous behaviors, they also raise concerns about privacy, fairness, and potential misuse of personal data. Yet empirical research on how people perceive AI-enhanced monitoring of public spaces remains limited. We conducted an online survey ($N=720$) using a 3$\times$3 factorial design to examine percep…

'Bound to browsable' - love this detailed overview of the work that goes into making specific formats (like magazines) more findable in online catalogues https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/09/unlocking-historical-media-publications/

Bound to Browsable: Unlocking the Historical Media Publications Collection | The Signal
This post details the exciting transformation of the Historical Media Publications Collection, a challenging digital collection of historical media industry magazines spanning the late 19th to mid-20th century. Expanding online presentation from dense bound volumes into searchable, issue-level resources, this collaborative project improved discoverability and usability of this collection and set a foundation for working with other serialized content though innovative new workflows and next-gene…

Now that I’m almost certainly past the half-way point of my life, I’ve realized that many things I used to care about matter little to me. Tech is getting worse in most ways, few new movies interest me, most online spaces are not enjoyable to me. What I am bummed about not getting to experience,though, is meeting new, wonderful generations - and especially not getting to hear their music. Because some of the new bands out there are just *wild*, and I love it so, so much.

❝Healthy digital spaces need the same foundations as physical ones (roads, rules, records, etc) so we can build the flourishing fun bits on top. If the web’s first generation gave us villages, and the second gave us gross, unliveable megacities, the next one should give us great neighbourhoods — small, knowable, human-scaled spaces where we can actually live together online.❞

(please don't) add me to the group
We talk a lot about how broken the internet is for all of us as individuals. Doomscrolling, algorithmic feeds, overall exhaustion at The Horrors. But this...

In light of "Antifa" being designated a "terrorist organization," a (very mildly) good thing that anyone can do is say publicly: "I am antifa."
Antifa is *already* a decentralized non-organization, but throwing up enough chaff that dragnet "surveillance" of online spaces becomes useless is a good thing. I promise you really don't want to live in the world in which whoever the president considers "antifa" has been hunted down and locked up, but thankfully, the president doesn't have the resources to make that happen without lots of local police cooperation. Local police are generally champing at the bit to bash leftists under the flimsiest of pretexts and already have programs doing undercover surveillance of leftist spaces, but they also don't want to look like fools or be mocked by their communities, so a strong public response indicating sympathy for and/or real solidarity with "antifa" could influence things right now.
#Antifa

Leveraging LLM Agents for Automated Video Game Testing
Chengjia Wang, Lanling Tang, Ming Yuan, Jiongchi Yu, Xiaofei Xie, Jiajun Bu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22170 https://

Leveraging LLM Agents for Automated Video Game Testing
Testing MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) is a critical yet labor-intensive task in game development due to their complexity and frequent updating nature. Traditional automated game testing approaches struggle to achieve high state coverage and efficiency in these rich, open-ended environments, while existing LLM-based game-playing approaches are limited to shallow reasoning ability in understanding complex game state-action spaces and long-complex tasks. To address thes…

A hyperreduced manifold learning approach to nonlinear model order reduction for the homogenisation of hyperelastic RVEs
Erik Faust, Lisa Scheunemann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21527

A hyperreduced manifold learning approach to nonlinear model order reduction for the homogenisation of hyperelastic RVEs
In a recent work, we proposed a graph-based manifold learning scheme for the nonlinear Galerkin-reduction of quasi-static solid mechanical problems [1]. The resulting nonlinear approximation spaces can closely and flexibly represent nonlinear solution manifolds. The present work discusses how this nonlinear model order reduction (MOR) approach can be employed to reduce online computational costs by multiple orders of magnitude while retaining high levels of accuracy. We integrate two popular hy…

The next #IIIF Community Call is on 'AI Bot Management', Weds October 8 at 12pm ET / 16:00 UTC. Call links etc at https://iiif.io/community
What are you doing about bots swarming your GLAM website …

Replaced article(s) found for stat.ML. https://arxiv.org/list/stat.ML/new
[2/2]:
- Minimax Adaptive Online Nonparametric Regression over Besov Spaces
Paul Liautaud (LPSM), Pierre Gaillard (Thoth, UGA), Olivier Wintenberger (LPSM)

More manuscripts are coming to the British Library's online site https://www.bl.uk/collection/digitised-manuscripts-archives
And, erm, how can I say this nicely? If you have a cheeky script that downloads images from the site, please build in some delays…

Digitised manuscripts and archives - British Library
View more than 2,000 of our digitised manuscripts and archival documents, including the Sherborne Missal and Octateuch, Four Gospels and Synodicon.

'The digital commons should not be treated as an object ripe for extraction, but as an expression of “commoning” [Dulong de Rosnay and Stalder 2020]; i.e., as a manifestation of the practice of making, maintaining, and protecting shared and open resources.'
From 'Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons' https://www.…

Generative AI and the Future of the Digital Commons: Five Open Questions and Knowledge Gaps
The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) relies heavily on the digital commons, a vast collection of free and open online content that is created, shared, and maintained by communities. However, this relationship is becoming increasingly strained due to financial burdens, decreased contributions, and misalignment between AI models and community norms. As we move deeper into the GenAI era, it is essential to examine the interdependent relationship between GenAI, the long-term sustainabilit…

Hierarchical Semantic RL: Tackling the Problem of Dynamic Action Space for RL-based Recommendations
Minmao Wang, Xingchen Liu, Shijie Yi, Likang Wu, Hongke Zhao, Fei Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Peng Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09167

Hierarchical Semantic RL: Tackling the Problem of Dynamic Action Space for RL-based Recommendations
Recommender Systems (RS) are fundamental to modern online services. While most existing approaches optimize for short-term engagement, recent work has begun to explore reinforcement learning (RL) to model long-term user value. However, these efforts face significant challenges due to the vast, dynamic action spaces inherent in recommendation, which hinder stable policy learning. To resolve this bottleneck, we introduce Hierarchical Semantic RL (HSRL), which reframes RL-based recommendation over…

A Framework for AI-Supported Mediation in Community-based Online Collaboration
Soobin Cho, Mark Zachry, David W. McDonald
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10015 https://

A Framework for AI-Supported Mediation in Community-based Online Collaboration
Online spaces involve diverse communities engaging in various forms of collaboration, which naturally give rise to discussions, some of which inevitably escalate into conflict or disputes. To address such situations, AI has primarily been used for moderation. While moderation systems are important because they help maintain order, common moderation strategies of removing or suppressing content and users rarely address the underlying disagreements or the substantive content of disputes. Mediatio…

One of the things it stressed is that we really don't know the motivation at this point. I think we're closer to "extremely online and weird" but we can't really say "he's a Groyper." I think this is pretty likely, but we should be honest that we don't actually know.
This is where I think it's important to realize we're operating in two spaces: reality and the meme space. The right now longer has a separation between the two. The meme they want to spread to attack the left is that it was some how associated with leftists (especially trans folks), so this is the meme they believe.
It's useful, on a memetic level, to disrupt this. The Groyper meme is a pretty solid response. But, at least as far as I'm aware, we're still not sure that's true. But we don't have to collapse meme space and reality. We have absurdism.
We don't know if he's a Groyper, or even a far right troll, for sure anyway. But we do know that #JeffryEpstein killed #CharlieKirk. #TheTruthIsOutThere #ReleaseTheFiles! #FreeLuigi