Mirco Musolesi
@mircomusolesi.bsky.social
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
Probably one of the best tech stories of this month. The team behind an NPR podcast noticed a flood of baffling comments under their Spotify episodes, but they weren’t bots. techcrunch.com/2026/09/25/t...
The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR's comment section? | TechCrunch
When NPR staffers flagged strange comments under their podcasts on Spotify as bots, it took a Gen Z colleague to (immediately) figure out the mystery.
techcrunch.com
The closing sentences of Margaret Boden's "Creativity and Artificial Intelligence" (1998). "Only a few AI-models can critically judge their own original ideas. And hardly any can combine evaluation with transformation." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Professional ethics as a problem of AI decision-making: our new preprint with Omri Asscher examines how AI systems navigate conflicting ethical objectives in law, medicine, and translation. Link to the preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2608.29306
New preprint: “The Limits of Automatic Evaluation of Creativity in Large Language Models” with Alessandro Tutone and Giorgio Franceschelli. Link to the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2608.23705 1/4
We proposed this point of view/explanation (presenting a simple mathematical model supported by some empirical evidence) in a 2015 paper led by Kai Zhao: www.nature.com/articles/sre...
Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportationmodality decomposition - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Explaining the power-law distribution of human mobility through transportationmodality decomposition
nature.com
NetScience@netscience.bsky.social · last mo.The power law in human mobility is a mixture artifact: evidence from a pandemic natural experiment arxiv.org/abs/2608.23194
If you are an Apple user, you probably received the message about updating to Tahoe 26.6.2 (just 10 days after the previous update). Looking at the description of the security fixes, I noticed that a large number of bugs are credited to the OpenAI Codex team. support.apple.com/en-gb/148282
About the security content of iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1 – Apple Support (UK)
This update delivers security fixes that were first made available in the iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 betas. This document describes the security content of iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1.
support.apple.com
Just discovered that Margaret Hamilton is 90 today. I like the history of computing and in my lectures I tend to refer to the Greats of the past quite often. 1/5
Tomorrow, our paper "An Agent-Centric Dynamical Systems Perspective on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" with James Rudd-Jones and Maria Perez-Ortiz will be presented at RLC 2026 (@rl-conference.bsky.social) in Montreal. Paper: rlj.cs.umass.edu/2026/papers/... 1/4 #RLC2026
This is a very interesting collection of articles and posts about Python by Guido van Rossum himself, including lots of fascinating details about the origins and development of the language: gvanrossum.github.io/python-histo...
The History of Python
gvanrossum.github.io
The side effects of buying (too many) books. www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-...
The Six Stages of Having Too Many Books
What happens when a mere shelf will not do.
newyorker.com
New preprint with Giorgio Franceschelli: "On the Creativity of AI Agents". Can AI agents be truly creative? In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework for analysing agent creativity and outline key open questions in this fast-moving area. Link to the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.13242
Our paper with Marta Emili Garcia Segura and Steve Hailes "Opponent Shaping in LLM Agents" is going to be presented this week at #ICLR2026. Saturday 25 April 2026 10:30-1:00pm BRT Pavillion 4 4618 Link to the paper: openreview.net/pdf?id=yJoHT...
These LLM-generated emails are getting good. This one summed up one of the strands of our current work perfectly and even included a very handy link for my own website.
Teaching "Generative Artificial Intelligence" this term. Started today's class with an example celebrating our founder. #UCL200
New paper in Transactions on Machine Learning Research with Giorgio Franceschelli: "DiffSampling: Enhancing Diversity and Accuracy in Neural Text Generation". Paper+code+video here: tmlr.infinite-conf.org/paper_pages/...
More formally, the probability is uniformly distributed across all possible weather conditions.
During the past year, our lab (in particular, Giorgio Franceschelli and myself) have been involved in the @oecd-ocde.bsky.social Working Group on AI and the Future of Skills. 1/6
Rightmove added the strapline “believe it” to its logo. The reference to what an estate agent tells you is clear (don’t).
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
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
Mirco Musolesi@mircomusolesi.bsky.social · last yr.Wonders of the natural world. I inherited an office cactus from a colleague who left. In a matter of days, out of nothing the cactus has developed a very long stem (with flowers).
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
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
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
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... .
What the graduate unemployment story gets wrong
People with a degree are faring better, not worse than their non-graduate counterparts
ft.com
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 · 12mo ago📢 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 w/ @mircomusolesi.bsky.social
![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.)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreic7wdqg4w6qfevbqzzq4esd6237pojsnpwsrbb7gaxsxobqaiwazm)
![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.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreicp2ka5asjgkmgfdfj33vnjb5bbvk3vnyao6ju5kipxcdc23pqasm)