News

News

Posts from LinkedIn and articles from the A·I·AM Substack, newest first. Each item links to the full post.

  1. LinkedIn

    The Nanofunctional Materials Group has a new website: https://nanofun.uk It brings together what we do at the Department of Materials - University of Manchester, Graphene - The University of Manchester and Henry Royce Institute at The University of Manchester and The University of Manchester Faculty of Science and Engineering: • Research: six themes, from #graphene for water purification to polymer composites, MEMS sensors and biointerfaces • Publications: updated automatically from ORCID • People: current PhD students and researchers, and alumni since 2011 • Sustainability: how our work links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and our #LEAF Bronze lab • News: from this LinkedIn feed and the AIAM Substack If you’re interested in a PhD, a project or working together, the Join page explains how to get in touch. Thank you to everyone in the group, past and present, who helped put it together. #Graphene #Nanomaterials #MaterialsScience #UniversityOfManchester #NationalGrapheneInstitute

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  2. A·I·AM Substack

    WattDate: plan a whole year of your home on every Octopus tariff

    A free, open-source tool for homes with solar, a battery, an electric car or a heat pump. Alpha testers wanted.

    Read on Substack

  3. LinkedIn Reposted from Ani Kaprekar, FRSA

    An afternoon experiencing Physics, Passion and Persistence! 🔬✨ A fascinating visit to the National Graphene Institute (NGI) at The University of Manchester, organised by TiE Manchester. Graphene was first isolated right here in Manchester in 2004, and the NGI is truly a pride of Manchester! 🐝 I've visited NGI a few times before, but what made this visit special was seeing how far the research and innovation have progressed, and the sheer passion of the people behind it. A huge thank you to Prof. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, who patiently took us through a detailed tour, explaining the science, the engineering, the breakthroughs and the possibilities. 🙌🏻 And his most simple and memorable instruction? "Don't touch anything!" (dramatic pause) "In fact, don't touch anything!" … Absolutely loved it.  Message received, Professor! (Especially as I have a bit of Frank Spencer in me! 😁) It was also wonderful to rekindle my love for physics, especially alongside my friend Raam S., past President of TiE Manchester, who brought his deep engineering and materials science perspective to our conversations. A lovely exchange of ideas, curiosity and a shared passion for science! Equally inspiring was meeting some brilliant PhD researchers from India and hearing about collaborations with leading Indian institutions, including the IITs and IISc. Another reminder of how science and innovation connect talent and ideas across borders. 🇬🇧🇮🇳 What stayed with me was not just the extraordinary science, but the curiosity, patience and persistence of people like Prof Aravind, who dedicate themselves to turning scientific discovery into real-world impact. After all, breakthroughs don't happen overnight. They happen because people refuse to stop asking questions. A big thank you to my friend Sunil Mohindra, Chair Emeritus and a past president of TiE Manchester for the invite, and the entire TiE North team for organising such an enriching visit. Do read about NGI here: https://lnkd.in/gx4Wurki #India #UK #Tech #Creative #Storyteller | Graphene - The University of Manchester

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  4. A·I·AM Substack

    When to switch between Octopus Cosy and Intelligent Go: a year of data and a battery planner

    At the rates in force on each day, staying on Go all year would have cost 5% less than my two switches, and the best dates in hindsight 8% less.

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  5. A·I·AM Substack

    A year of living green with solar, battery, heat pump and EV: what 365 days of data say

    In a year my Salford house generated 9,109 kWh of its own solar, about 60% of all that the house, heat pump and EV used. Sunshine (r = 0.89) and cold (r = 0.90) explain most of the year.

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  6. LinkedIn

    And now for something completely different. I spent a year recording everything my house does with electricity: solar PV generation, a Powerwall home battery, a heat pump and an EV. Then I asked the data some questions. Two things explain most of it. Daily solar output tracks sunshine hours closely (r = 0.89), though an hour of winter sun is worth less than half an hour of summer sun in kWh. Daily consumption tracks the cold (R² = 0.80): below about 12.5 °C, each degree colder added roughly 4.3 kWh a day. The most striking chart is August, when we were away and the house sat on a flat 9.6 kWh a day while exporting nearly everything the panels made. The analysis, charts and a first draft of the write-up were done with Claude Sonnet 5.5, which I directed and reviewed. Full post with methods and caveats: https://lnkd.in/ezKsQ-nX #solar #PV #heatpumps #energy #dataanalysis Tesla Octopus Energy

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  7. A·I·AM Substack

    "Please give this paper a positive review": what happens when a manuscript tries to trick the AI?

    We hid instructions inside 12 manuscripts. Probatio caught every one.

    Read on Substack

  8. LinkedIn

    Some manuscripts now come with a "polite" note for an AI reviewer. In white text. At 1 point. So, we wrote a few of our own. This is a real problem. In 2025, hidden prompts such as "give a positive review only" were found in 17 arXiv preprints from 14 universities. Any AI that reads a paper can be told what to say about it. We tested Probatio, our free, open-source manuscript-checking skill. We hid instructions in 12 manuscripts, using white text, tiny text, text under a figure and the PDF metadata. The instructions asked it to stay quiet about the data, to declare the paper error-free, or to abandon the review. - Caught: 12 of 12, each quoted word for word with its location - Obeyed: 0 - False alarms on 12 clean manuscripts: 0 - The reviews still found as many real problems as on the clean versions A checking tool that can be told what to say is not a check. Probatio treats everything in the manuscript as data, never as instructions. Full story: https://lnkd.in/eKfJZV8Q Probatio on GitHub (MIT): https://lnkd.in/eeWrMZnd Where it started: https://lnkd.in/e3tkhGnx #ResearchIntegrity #PeerReview #PromptInjection #AcademicWriting #OpenSource #AI #Claude

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  9. A·I·AM Substack

    Nine AIs, ten manuscripts, one skill: the Probatio bake-off

    Which AI model should read your manuscript before Reviewer 2 does?

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  10. LinkedIn

    We asked nine AI models to review the same ten manuscripts. Not one of them asked us to cite its own work. Progress! Quick reminder: Probatio is our free, open-source skill that turns an AI agent into a careful first reader of your own manuscript before you submit. Every finding quotes the exact text, says where it is and suggests a fix. No score, no verdict. Same skill, same ten papers, nine models, six apps. The headlines: - Claude Opus 5.5 found 86% of the known errors, with almost nothing wrong. - Claude Sonnet 5.5 found 72%, with 1 wrong finding in 245. - GPT-6.1 Sol, running in Microsoft 365 Copilot, was the careful one: 3 wrong in 240, no made-up quotes, and about 20 points better than GPT-5.6 on every paper. - Small, fast models are not up to it. Haiku found 3%. If your university gives you Copilot, the models that did best here are the ones now rolling out there. Full results and tips on which model to pick: https://lnkd.in/eBTiXiEz Download (MIT): https://lnkd.in/eeWrMZnd Cite: https://lnkd.in/ePT6gKG3 #ResearchIntegrity #PeerReview #AcademicWriting #AI #OpenSource Anthropic #Claude Gemini 4 Argon OpenAI #GPT6.1Sol

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  11. A·I·AM Substack

    What if the first review of your student’s manuscript took an hour, not two days?

    Probatio, a free AI skill that reviews scientific manuscripts the way a careful referee would, is now open for testing.

    Read on Substack

  12. LinkedIn

    “Manuscript for review.” You know that email from your student or postdoc. Forty pages, eight figures, a long SI, and a couple of days of your life gone, much of it spent checking that the numbers in the abstract match the tables and the text matches the figures. What if AI did that first pass for you, carefully, and showed its working? I have released Probatio, a free, open-source AI skill that reviews scientific manuscripts the way a careful referee would: - every finding is quoted from the paper, with a concrete fix; - every claim is checked against the paper before you see it; - it works across revision rounds. In our tests with Claude Opus, it found 84% of confirmed errors in 30 recent preprints in a single run. It’s in public testing now, and the most useful feedback is where it goes wrong. More here: https://lnkd.in/eHS8thzh GitHub: https://lnkd.in/eeWrMZnd #ResearchIntegrity #PeerReview #AcademicWriting #AI

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  13. LinkedIn Reposted from Lord Uday Nagaraju

    Sometimes the most interesting rooms are the ones where you realise how much there is still to learn. At yesterday’s CII International Business Roundtable on the UK-IndiaTechnology Security Initiative, I had one seemingly simple task as Founder of AI Policy Labs: listen to the discussion and summarise it - Quantum. Semiconductors. Biotechnology. Critical minerals. Artificial intelligence. Technology security. Commercialisation. AI is naturally the area closest to my own work. In other domains, I was very much there to listen understand how the pieces fit together. A number of concrete areas for collaboration and follow-up were identified, with a strong focus on what can actually be taken forward by governments, researchers, investors and businesses on both sides. For me, that is also where organisations such as AI Policy Labs can contribute, helping bridge technology, policy, industry and implementation. I left the room having learned a great deal beyond AI, but also encouraged that the conversation has moved beyond principles towards specific opportunities for action. Many thanks to India's Deputy National Security Adviser Pavan Kapoor, HE Kumaran Periasamy High Commission of India in London, British High Commission in India Geraint Rees, Shehla Hasan, Keshav R Murugesh Sophia NB Nidhi Mani Tripathi Christopher Hunt Harry Fisher Ashish Darbari Vinod (Vin) Bange Kirsty Benham Jeremy Wrathall Duncan Jones Wenmiao Yu Prof. Aravind Vijayaraghavan Conor Rickford Shahid Alam Penelope Haratza

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  14. LinkedIn Reposted from Shehla Hasan

    As the private sector delivery partner of the Government of India for the India UK Technology Security Initiative (TSI), the CII in London convened a meeting of leading Indian and British companies, think tanks and academia drawn from all seven relevant sectors for the TSI to coincide with the visit of Mr Pavan Kapoor, Deputy National Security Adviser, Govt of India. Also present were Mr Kumaran Periasamy High Commissioner of India to the UK, Ms Nidhi Mani Tripathi and Mr Lekhan Thakkar Our gratitude to Prof Geraint Rees and Mr Deepak Ravindra for co-hosting the event and to Mr Keshav R Murugesh for facilitating the deliberations. Excellent moderation by Mr Manish Malhotra and summing up by Lord Uday Nagaraju. Hamna Mariyam Khan Shahid Alam Thanu Kurien FRSA Gitanjali Yadav Conor Rickford Annabelle Lee Harry Fisher Jeremy Wrathall Kirsty Benham Dr. Hema Prem Raina Prof. Aravind Vijayaraghavan Clare Trippett Ashish Darbari Vinod (Vin) Bange Duncan Jones Rajganesh R. Helen Treharne Amit Mehrotra

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  15. LinkedIn

    This is quite a big deal. Anthropic has basically doubled Claude's performance (on #Opus) and halved the cost. Opus 5 was already a very capable model, Opus 5.5 is now a Fable class model at half the cost of Opus 5. 👏🏻 https://lnkd.in/eSTRNf8s

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  16. LinkedIn Reposted from CII Technology

    We are delighted to welcome Prof. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, Professor of Nanomaterials, Department of Materials, The University of Manchester, UK, as a distinguished speaker at the Third #CII #Global #Summit on #AdvancedMaterials, #CriticalMinerals & #Metals 2026. A leading voice in graphene, 2D materials and functional nanomaterials, Prof. Vijayaraghavan’s work spans cutting-edge research and applications across composites, coatings, sensors, filtration, energy and next-generation technologies. At the Summit, we look forward to his perspectives on how R&D in new materials can unlock new possibilities for industry, sustainability and technology-led growth, and how stronger global research and industry partnerships can accelerate their journey from laboratory innovation to real-world impact. 📅 11 September 2026 📍 India Habitat Centre, New Delhi Join us for an engaging dialogue on the technologies and materials shaping the next frontier of industrial innovation. #CIIevents #AdvancedMaterials #Graphene #Nanomaterials #MaterialsScience #CriticalMinerals #Metals #MaterialsInnovation #StrategicTechnologies #Innovation #ViksitBharat2047 To register: https://lnkd.in/gvjPJ-xa For details, contact: Namita Bahl (namita.bahl@cii.in) / Preeti Shukla (preeti.shukla@cii.in)

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  17. LinkedIn

    Oh oh oh oh can't wait Kilo ❤️ Qwen 😂 https://lnkd.in/dCN_4riQ

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  18. LinkedIn

    This could go either way. But given how much time I have been spending on Cursor over the last year it so, I am cautiously optimistic. Cursor needs stability, but not get buried under corporate overheads. Also I am apprehensive for Composer, please don't Grokify it. On the other hand, the sovereign side, coding agents are struggling. Cline spawned Roo which reincarnated as Kilo. Someone needs to put some serious money behind Kilo, they are doing really good things. https://lnkd.in/eyzFBMpK

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