matthes

Karma: 462

Talk to me about your thoughts on how to best study wild animals and their welfare at scale!

I live in Sheffield where I work as an engineer on cool stuff to improve the world. Most of my time has been on a pandemic preparedness project, but recently started some shrimp welfare work that I am excited about.

I recently restarted EA Sheffield as a city group. Come along to our next social if you’re in the area! I organised EA North 2025 and might make it an annual thing.

I have a PhD in computer science and an undergrad degree in physics. For my PhD thesis I co-developed an open source, low-power, low-cost location data logger to help biologists study wild animals.

matthes May 6, 2025, 8:24 AM
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in reply to: Karla Still 🔸’s comment on: 12x more cost-effective than EAG—how I organised EA North 2025 (and how you could do something similar)
Those events sound great! Thank you for sharing this.

matthes May 2, 2025, 11:02 AM
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in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: 12x more cost-effective than EAG—how I organised EA North 2025 (and how you could do something similar)
I set up a WhatsApp community for the North of England as part of this. I’ll send you a link. If others are interested feel free to DM me.

(It currently looks like a retreat might be happening later this year.)

matthes Feb 18, 2025, 5:06 PM
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in reply to: gergo’s comment on: EA North is happening in Sheffield on Saturday 26 April
Thanks for asking! I added it to the post. The deadline for applications is Monday, 31 March.

matthes Oct 3, 2024, 10:53 AM
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in reply to: gergo’s comment on: EA Sheffield is restarting as a city group
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!

matthes Aug 7, 2024, 5:54 PM
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in reply to: ThomNorman’s comment on: animal welfare outside of EA—numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024
Thanks for sharing your experience! Maybe this was unusual for animal related events.

My experience with academic conferences comes mostly from non-related computer science conferences.

matthes Jul 22, 2024, 10:05 PM
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in reply to: Vanessa’s comment on: animal welfare outside of EA—numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024
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.)