arjen - Network

Anti-immigration and law & order party PVV spends 900M€ more on immigration and refuses to invest in extra prisons.If you voted PVV,...

Anti-immigration and law & order party PVV spends 900M€ more on immigration and refuses to invest in extra prisons.

If you voted PVV, is this what you had in mind?

I definitely prefer the SQL way of interacting with the data, but getting the CSV file from the Hora Finita system would have resulted in...

I definitely prefer the SQL way of interacting with the data, but getting the CSV file from the Hora Finita system would have resulted in some complex and time consuming emacs regex replace macro writing that I have been happy to skip.

---- After asking Bing Chat to convert the copy-pasted cie.txt (from Hora Finita)-- with prompts:-- Can you reconstruct an ASCII dump into...

--
-- After asking Bing Chat to convert the copy-pasted cie.txt (from Hora Finita)
-- with prompts:
-- Can you reconstruct an ASCII dump into a CSV table?
-- Can you rename column Ius to Profile, and the previous column to just Substantiation?
--
create table cie as select * from read_csv('cie.csv');
select '"' || Member || '" <' || Contact || '>' as Member from cie;

ERCIM News special on AI for Cultural Heritageby guest editors Laura Hollink @laurahollink and George...

ERCIM News special on

AI for Cultural Heritage

by guest editors Laura Hollink @laurahollink and George Pavlidis:

https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en141/special/ai-for-cultural-heritage-introduction-to-the-special-theme

The news about Harvard standing up against modern time oppression by the Trump administration reminds me of Radboud University in...

The news about Harvard standing up against modern time oppression by the Trump administration reminds me of Radboud University in 1943.

Rector Magnificus Bernard Hermesdorf refused to present students with a declaration of loyalty to the German occupying forces. The inevitable consequences of this fundamental decision were that the university was forced to close its gates indefinitely.

See:
https://www.ru.nl/en/about-us/history-and-identity/history-of-radboud-university

Radboud reopened after the war, and keeps going strong!

So:
Go Harvard, Go

Bing Chat just converted a messed up copy-paste of a table in one of our horrible admin systems (hora finita) - perfectly - into a CSV to...

Bing Chat just converted a messed up copy-paste of a table in one of our horrible admin systems (hora finita) - perfectly - into a CSV to process with DuckDB to get a nice email list.

First actual time ever that an LLM tool was really practically useful for me.

And now it has actually happened: prof. Hannes Muhleisen has received the Dutch ICT Research...

And now it has actually happened: prof. Hannes Muhleisen has received the Dutch ICT Research Award.

https://ict-research.nl/2025/04/dutch-prize-for-ict-research-2025-awarded-to-prof-dr-hannes-muhleisen/

Cool video with Hannes about the awarded tech, DuckDB:
https://youtu.be/PQGN_nGhmpI

(featuring Hannes, with PhD candidate Laurens Kuiper in the opening shot - which makes me proud too, as Laurens did his MSc under my guidance and has meanwhile grown into a high impact DB researcher: with an upcoming join paper at VLDB!! :-)

Followup toot on: https://idf.social/@arjen/113822179908333585

https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-42/FC42 has arrived!

https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-42/

FC42 has arrived!

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the absence of safeguards for the right to information and the tech industry’s overwhelming...

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the absence of safeguards for the right to information and the tech industry’s overwhelming influence on European AI Act’s Code of Practice, and withdraws from negotiations

https://rsf.org/en/rsf-withdraws-negotiations-european-ai-act-s-code-practice

Why?

The right to information isn't even mentioned in the text. It ignores risks of spreading untrustworthy information, deepfakes, AI-generated fake news sites, disinformation embedded in chatbots, and considers the protection of fundamental rights optional.

Podcast with me :-) About the nice ppl at DuckDB, the DuckDB FAISS community extension and why that is a good idea but also some better...

Podcast with me :-)

About the nice ppl at DuckDB, the DuckDB FAISS community extension and why that is a good idea but also some better ideas yet to come.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/33get9iGEZXMsgKiOZ2mml?si=0fSapc9ZSouNOPo9dSlv7g

And... back on v4.2.20

And... back on v4.2.20

Interesting move by Google (partnering with NVIDIA). Run Gemini and AI on-prem with Google Distributed Cloud | Google Cloud...

Interesting move by Google (partnering with NVIDIA).

Run Gemini and AI on-prem with Google Distributed Cloud | Google Cloud Blog
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/run-gemini-and-ai-on-prem-with-google-distributed-cloud

Revisiting the yellow Google Search Appliance era, within ten years after retiring that business?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance

(It does make sense IMHO!)

Opiniestuk over Bruins (en zijn obsessie om als zelfverklaarde jezusfiguur de maatschappij te redden):Pas op voor de glimlachende en zalvend...

Opiniestuk over Bruins (en zijn obsessie om als zelfverklaarde jezusfiguur de maatschappij te redden):

Pas op voor de glimlachende en zalvend pratende bewindslieden in dit kabinet
https://ukrant.nl/pas-op-voor-de-glimlachende-en-zalvend-pratende-bewindslieden-in-dit-kabinet/

Het omroepbestel voldoet volgens Bruins niet meer omdat ‘loyaliteiten steeds sneller ingewisseld worden voor andere’. Bruins – inmiddels toe aan zijn derde politieke partij – verheft zichzelf hier tot de maat der dingen.

Ook waar: natuurkundigen zouden geen minister moeten willen worden.

Trump is heffing the time of his life (#Lubach)

Trump is heffing the time of his life

(#Lubach)

Trots!#Radboud is één van de twee universiteiten die al meteen aankondigen naar de rechter te stappen....

Trots!

#Radboud is één van de twee universiteiten die al meteen aankondigen naar de rechter te stappen.
https://www.universiteitenvannederland.nl/actueel/nieuws/onderwijsbezuinigingen-aangenomen-universiteiten-naar-de-rechter

Contractbreuk door de overheid. Aanpakken dat zootje radicaal rechts dat heult met stel hopeloze christenen. In de prullenbak met die begroting!

@doree-ai.bsky.social hey from the Fediverse!!

@doree-ai.bsky.social hey from the Fediverse!!

Harrie Oosterhuis got a paper in with Google (very exciting work, we saw a glimpse of it in a meeting and I'm looking forward to the...

Harrie Oosterhuis got a paper in with Google (very exciting work, we saw a glimpse of it in a meeting and I'm looking forward to the actual paper going out), a resource paper by/with former MSc student Jingwei Kang (now doing his PhD at UvA).

Finally, Heydar Soudani has got himself a ticket to the SIGIR doctoral consortium with his PhD research.

I guess we should be happy!

#Informagus aka #Radboud IR team @ #SIGIR2025 notification day.

5/5

And then we did not yet talk about Harrie Oosterhuis @harrieo.bsky.social and his team at Radboud Uni and Google. Harrie co-authored the...

And then we did not yet talk about Harrie Oosterhuis @harrieo.bsky.social and his team at Radboud Uni and Google. Harrie co-authored the perspective paper, bringing in his reinforcement learning magic, but also has multiple papers accepted in this year's SIGIR conference (4 out of a crazy number of 7 submissions, so more coming up I guess!).

Among his accepted works, also a very cool LTR paper where @normanknyazev.bsky.social is the lead author, well done Norman!
4/5

Daria Alexander @doree-ai.bsky.social her short paper accepted on query intent classification (not) using LLMs. The paper demonstrates that...

Daria Alexander @doree-ai.bsky.social her short paper accepted on query intent classification (not) using LLMs.

The paper demonstrates that this is a problem where LLMs actually do not help improve results, but involve way more costs. An expensive approach not worthwhile, and an important lesson too - maybe GenAI is the coolest tech that we do not yet understand, but you do not need it for every single problem. This question should be asked more often.

3/5

As more often, the "sure bet" did not make it - but we had one really useful review there that will improve a future version of...

As more often, the "sure bet" did not make it - but we had one really useful review there that will improve a future version of the paper. The other review that voted for reject was useless though.

@djoerd has a short paper accepted that introduces a technique to more or less encode prior information useful for ranking into document identifiers, with the very practical advantage to require less data for ranking - which we already used for real in a prototype for the open web search project. 2/5