Thejasvi Beleyur
Mics. Cameras. Echolocation!
Studying active sensing in collectives: bat echolocation in groups, Ro-BATs, and writing niche Python packages.
Group leader at CASCB, Uni Konstanz.
Check out more at thejasvibr.github.io and activesensingcollectives.com
- Realised today that one of the packages I wrote during my postdoc (beamshapes, see QR code) has been used and cited to do some cool science. I'm feeling unusually happy about this, somehow even more than a paper citation. Shout-out to the @dfg.de + @cbehav.bsky.social for funding this work.
- Also the link here below: beamshapes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/in...
- This is scarily true - professional + collegial attention- & esp. true for scientific software. I'm imagining a niche field - where there are anyway only 1-2 OSS package/s out there. Even lesser incentives to develop, test, document, if it'll all be spat out as code snippets 1/2
- New post, on how AI is coming for open source software: kucharski.substack.com/p/will-your-...
- ..all of this without the usual process of a colleague going through the package website, trying to see if it's relevant, looking at described examples, gauging code and documentation quality etc.
- Thur can't be said enough 🤣 it's a choice that they're brushing past you, and very rarely an accident
- Reposted by Thejasvi Beleyur“History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost…those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students & to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write & think when others once risked their lives & died for the freedom to do so”
- Reposted by Thejasvi Beleyur📢 ANTS 2026 deadline extended to 20 Nov 2025! No further extensions will be granted. If you haven’t submitted yet, there’s still time to share your latest work with the swarm intelligence community. We look forward to seeing your contributions!
- Plenary by @natashamhatre.bsky.social - on her 'random biased walk in science" - featuring the coolest insect acoustics, tool-use by crickets, many cool FEM animations and hearing #IBAC25
- Seeing advertisements by OpenAI I'm Bengaluru saying 'I want to give a public speech...teach me how'...with ChatGPT written in blazing letters below. Wow. what exactly does the company think an LLM can do...? #AIhype
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurAnd just like that, #Behaviour2025 is finished! Huge thanks to the organizers and everyone who made this happen!
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurBeautiful work by @ronjabigge.bsky.social and Rebecca Grittner is out 🥳 How do the statistics of natural visual scenes and the relevance of these stimuli for the moths' flight safety shape the integration of parallel pathways for flight guidance? ✈️🦋
- New work from the lab - final version out: #parallel #processing #optic_flow #flight #vision In hummingbird hawkmoth flight control, natural input prevalence shapes the visual field partitioning of two parallel pathways, but safety relevance determines the integration hierarchy. tinyurl.com/bdfsxea2
- Fieldwork - this time with the lab! Fieldwork in the campus @uni-konstanz.de by the lake with a view, and WiFi, what a luxury 😎 @albertodoimo.bsky.social @adityamoger.bsky.social
- Night photo by @adityamoger.bsky.social
- Reposted by Thejasvi Beleyur📢 2 PhD positions (E13 TV-L, 75%) in our DFG-funded project on great ape communication & the evolution of common ground! 🧠 Backgrounds in biology, psychology or linguistics welcome. 🗓️ Deadline: Aug 13 🔗 bit.ly/4l8p7hy & bit.ly/46jcfAq Please share! @elmanubohn.bsky.social @meanwhileina.bsky.social
- 🎉Exciting times ahead for @elmanubohn.bsky.social, Michael Franke, and me! We will soon be advertising 2 PhD positions (linguistics/biology/psychology) for our SFB subproject "Modeling Great Ape Signaling Behaviour" 🧮 🐵 Stay tuned!
- Reposted by Thejasvi Beleyur[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurModern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurMove over, starling murmurations. There’s a slimier, squirmier collective behavior in town. It's a living, twisting tower of worms. Everybody, meet the wormuration 🪱🪱 Latest paper by Daniela Perez, Serena Ding and team @uni-konstanz.de Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... youtube.com/shorts/F8QVc...
- Feels like the right kind of post to tag @laurieparrot.bsky.social and @luisana (why can't I tag you!)
- Just learned it's #WorldParrotDay - a good day to post these white-fronted amazon parrots that @juliahallie.bsky.social and I met in Monteverde, Costa Rica. We can't agree on who took these photos so I'm giving partial credit 😂 #parrot #birds #birding #nature #wildlife #photo #photography #costarica
- Deadline for the advertised PhD position to study echolocating bat swarms in the wild with a multi-sensor rig ended this week Monday (25/5) (www.activesensingcollectives.com/openings/)! Big thanks and appreciate the interest of the 50+ people who sent in their applications!
- Just some water-striders doing their very cool thing of walking on water.
- One more month to the application deadline for a PhD position studying active sensing collectives in the wild with multiple sensors. Do you like this weird mix of animal behaviour, coding, and cool gadgets? Then check out the thread to see what our lab does and more on the position itself!!
- See more on the PhD position [here](www.activesensingcollectives.com/openings/) - and am also happy to receive informal queries. Please re-post and share in your circles!
- Reading a paper that uses mics to record a cool animal sound, and then the sentence along the lines of .... 'gain was regulated continuously to improve signal-to-noise' ratio....sigh. If you already have a bad SNR, amping up the gain will only make everything 'bigger', but SNR doesn't change!
- Handheld LiDAR scanners vs static high-res scanners.... anyone here with experience using either - would love to hear your thoughts. Please DM/reply to this post?!
- Opened up Spyder (Python GUI) for the first time in 4 weeks or so - moment of realization: this group leader thing is no joke 🐥
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurLet me introduce our new lab homepage. www.spatial-navigation.com We are looking for PhD students and one Postdoc that can start in November 2025. Contact me if you are in to studying spatial memory of honeybees. @uni-wuerzburg.de @neuroethology.org
- Hello World! After almost a month of starting a research group - finally the announcement :) We are the 'Active Sensing Collectives' group (tinyurl.com/yckehxys) at the CASCB in the University of Konstanz. We're still growing, see PhD position ad below. @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de z.de
- This is us (Gabriele, Alberto & I - L to R) totally not doing a staged photo-op. The screen does show some real data of our active-sensing Ro-BAT (the small white thing above the laptop) - with the spectrogram of the emitted call and the resulting echoes that are captured by the mic array.
- In our group we study how groups of active-sensing agents manage to sense their surroundings and show collective behaviour despite the challenge it presents. Why is it challenging - because each bat in the group is emitting really loud sounds - and listening for faint echoes 2/n
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View full threadSee more on the PhD position [here](www.activesensingcollectives.com/openings/) - and am also happy to receive informal queries. Please re-post and share in your circles!
- Just got my copy a few days earlier than expected. 70 pages in. So many valid points and much re-thinking to be done (esp for my own work) - looking forward to going through the book more times even in the future @ambikamath.bsky.social !
- Reposted by Thejasvi Beleyur
[This post could not be retrieved] - Waiting for my copy to arrive by post here in DE!
- Down with the flu, masked and waiting at the hospital. What started as a whiny skeet has turned into an optimistic one over 20 mins as I see people who were mask-less going in masked to see the doctor, & those with a 'free-nose' covering it up. This is all without any obvious masking mandate! Yay.
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurA locust swarm descended upon collective behavior! Excited to share my postdoc work with @icouzin.bsky.social
- Reposted by Thejasvi BeleyurLast call! Midnight tonight deadline to apply for a PhD with my group on serotine bat #ecology, helping develop rabies control strategy. Info here (nb. overseas fees waivers available & residency restrictions not relevant as project is field/desk not lab). www.sussex.ac.uk/study/fees-f... #bats
- Quote-posting for reference as a soon-to-be group leader. Data management -- hmmm, definitely need more training here.
- I feel like @kokkonut.bsky.social would appreciate this news - remembering her talk on senes ence at Etho 2025 a few days ago in Tutzing where Wisdom featured prominently as an example
- File under "best news you've heard in a while". Wisdom the albatross has a new baby ❤️ #birds 🌿 www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s...
- Echoes with what I have been generally feeling. Esp point 10 struck a chord - fact-checking AI output could be more tedious than just doing it yourself. I always felt this about people using esp AI for coding.... and leaving the best point for the last - "you do not have to use generative AI" ;)
- I argued yesterday with both a head of a law department who'd written a book on AI accountability and a young PhD student, neither of whom really understood how or when to use generative AI. Please consider this a draft and give me feedback or other links. joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2025/02/gene...
- An extremely confusing use/declaration of AI (most prob an LLM. Reading the Aldi-Süd monthly catalog with the image of a cheesy pizza served next to a bowl of...what appears to be..more cheese? And the text below which says 'serving suggestion generated with AI'... Is this a flex, hand-washing...or?
- Just extremely confusing because now I'm paying even more attention to something that is unclear? Hmmm.
- @marlenfroehlich.bsky.social hello hello!
- One of the many places that I think LLMs should be banned. To quote @ctrlalttim.bsky.social "We are supposed to be doing substantive, not performative work."
- Have to check out the original paper - but I must say the electrostatic sense - something that's so underappreciated and another of those 'alien' sensory modalities we may never fully be able to intuit (maybe aside from when I get zapped by static every now and then)?
- cool paper alert! flower mites use hummingbirds as taxis to move from flower to flower ok, super cool, but how do they quickly jump onto this taxi? turns out they sense the hummingbird's electric field and use electrostatic attraction to hop on! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- For a teeny tiny moment, I thought @joefresna.bsky.social had a really successful tortellini side-gig going on Germany-wide in all the LIDL's. And then it all came crashing down once I looked again.
- @joefresna.bsky.social hello hello. Glad to see more people I know here finally!
