matthes
Bio
Participation1
Talk to me about your thoughts on how to best study wild animals and their welfare at scale!
I am a final-year computer science PhD student at the University of Oxford with a physics background. For my thesis I have been co-developing and testing an open source, low-power, low-cost location data logger to help biologists study wild animals.
I recently restarted EA Sheffield as a city group. Come along to our next social if you're in the area!
How others can help me
I would love to chat to people about building better tech to study wild animals and their welfare.
How I can help others
I have some experience in building hardware (CAD, PCB design, ..) and writing code for various applications. I also have what is left from an undergraduate degree worth of physics knowledge (anything from mechanics to basic quantum field theory).
Posts 9
Comments3
It doesn't feel particularly different from other academic conferences to me. Most researchers don't reflect on what they think the most important research is and then go out and find the funding and institution to do exactly that. Instead, you usually apply to lots of PhD/postdoc positions that are vaguely in your field of expertise and you take what you get. Such positions often come with funding for some particular kind of work. I am not surprised that there is money in research on precision livestock farming, for example. I expect this is a bit different once you get tenure, but most research is done by early-career researchers (because there are so much more of them).
I assume the people there like animals a bit more than the average person. They probably chose their undergrad (veterinary science/biology/...) because of that. Then, at the end of their undergrad they would have chosen their final project from a limited list of possible projects offered by a limited number of labs (at a uni that they picked years previously for probably different reasons). And then, when they were applying to PhDs, they likely prioritised projects that were somewhat related to that undergrad project. Sadly, a lot of researchers stumble into their speciality like that.
(This is my personal impression of how academia works. I am not aware of any proper research on this.)
Thanks! I actually quite like a minimalist website for now. I wanted it to be free and future proof, so I went with a simple open source Jekyll theme as the base. Here is the source code if anyone wants to clone the EA Sheffield website: https://github.com/EA-Sheffield/EA-Sheffield.github.io
I might buy a custom domain at some point, but I am not sure it's worth the money.
For now, the focus of EA Sheffield is mostly to just offer community and support for people who are already into EA, rather than market and grow it. But maybe I'll get back to you on that if I have more bandwidth for this in the future! Amplify sounds interesting - good luck with it!