@williamrorchard

PhD student | Causality, ML, comp bio @Cambridge_Uni | ex-Applied Scientist Intern @AmazonScience | ex-Visiting researcher @HelmholtzMunich | opinions my own

 Cambridge, UK
Joined January 2019
  • Tweets284
  • Following588
  • Followers205
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William Orchard retweeted
Sam Greene@samagreene4 Sep 2025
In case anyone forgot: Russia went to war in 2014 to prevent Ukraine from signing a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU.
Tymofiy Mylovanov
@Mylovanov3 Sep 2025
Putin: We have always opposed Ukraine becoming a NATO member, but we have never objected to its membership in the EU. Every country has the right to choose its own security system, this also applies to Ukraine, but not at the expense of another country’s security. 1/
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William Orchard retweeted
Yuchen Zhu@_zhuyuchen10 Jul 2025
Long shot but does anyone still need Airbnb for #ICML2025 ? I have booked everything to go but just got diagnosed with an acute disease that now I can't go 😭😭 since not going, the funding body might not reimburse the costs. high appreciate retweeting or contacting re Airbnb 🙏🏻
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William Orchard retweeted
Lena Morrill@MorrillLena13 Mar 2025
Featured today by @MSKLibrary: A Dirichlet-multinomial mixed model for determining differential abundance of mutational signatures dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12859-02…

A Dirichlet-multinomial mixed model for determining differential abundance of mutational signatures

BMC Bioinformatics - Mutational processes of diverse origin leave their imprints in the genome during tumour evolution. These imprints are called mutational signatures and they have been...

link.springer.com
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❤️‍🔥 Passionate about gene regulation research, wet/dry lab? 🎡 Excited about London's vibrant research and social scene? 🔬 Looking for a funded postdoc position (+ ideally, have the CV & drive to apply for a fellowship in your 1st year)? Please DM/email me to discuss!
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Small clip from of me talking about some work I did at @AmazonScience on Root Cause Analysis! I was really happy to have a chance to briefly chat to @AleksanderMolak about this! (and mercifully he's edited out my terrible rambling - so do please check it out!)
This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
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William Orchard retweeted
Aylwyn Scally@aylwyn_scally27 Aug 2024
This is excellent and well worth reading for an informed opinion on the genetics of intelligence. Other kinds of opinion being abundant on this site.
Sasha Gusev
@SashaGusevPosts26 Aug 2024
Last week The Atlantic featured an article on the rising popularity of race/IQ science on the right (theatlantic.com/technology/a…). The obvious point that "intelligence is not like height" sparked an unusual amount of whinging. I wrote about how this is now more true than ever. 🧵
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William Orchard retweeted
Zhijing Jin@ZhijingJin22 Aug 2024
We will organize a "Causality for LLMs" Tutorial #NeurIPS2024 @NeurIPSConf. Happy to contribute to our community an intro of meaningful topics in Causal LLMs. And super excited for our panel w/ Yoshua, @bschoelkopf @LukeZettlemoyer @_jasonwei @Swarooprm7 @tom4everitt. Stay tuned!
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iran is announcing a GPT wrapper????
BRICS News
@BRICSinfo2 Aug 2024
JUST IN: 🇮🇷 Iranian media reports "in coming hours, the world will witness extraordinary scenes and very important developments."
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Monthly I host "data science lunch" in my dept. Today we discussed (among other things) limits on historical inference. This quote from Lewontin came up so I had to track it down (p130 "The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer"). Link to PDF in next >
Finally, I must say that the best lesson our readers can learn is to give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. History, and evolution is a form of history, simply does not leave sufficient traces, especially when it is the forces that are at issue. Form and even behavior may leave fossil remains, but forces like natural selection do not. It might be interesting to knnow hhow cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.

ALT Finally, I must say that the best lesson our readers can learn is to give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. History, and evolution is a form of history, simply does not leave sufficient traces, especially when it is the forces that are at issue. Form and even behavior may leave fossil remains, but forces like natural selection do not. It might be interesting to knnow hhow cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.

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William Orchard retweeted
Seva@SevaUT27 Jul 2024
when guys say they'd like to have a beer with a candidate everyone claps respectfully but when a woman says she'd like a margarita twenty thousand chuds come out to say women shouldn't vote
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👏Congrats to @MalyValerie for receiving an @alzassociation New to the Field Research Grant to study the role of 3D chromatin in alternative isoform choice in health and dementia!
VIB@VIBLifeSciences24 Jul 2024
🙌 Not one, not two, but three VIB researchers received a grant or fellowship from the Alzheimer's Association (@alzassociation)! Congratulations, @DrBilalKhalil, Mohamed Soliman, and @MalyValerie. (@CBD_VIB @CMN_VIB) 🏆 vibbio.tech/3WDJ2v6 🏆
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Due to the high visa cost related to my future PhD, I feel a bit embarrassed to let you know that I've started a gofundme if anyone, no matter sum, would feel comfortable contributing. Would mean the world.💕 gofundme.com/f/eleonoras-dre…

Donate to Eleonora's dream PhD at Oxford, organized by Eleonora Svanberg

Hi, My name is Eleonora Svanberg, and I've recently been admitted to pursue m… Eleonora Svanberg needs your support for Eleonora's dream PhD at Oxford

gofundme.com
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Identifying the true structure of the latent data generating process (causal world model) by learning from passive observation alone is impossible without reasonable priors, which transformers don’t have. This is why LLMs are brittle and can’t reliably do counter factual reasoning .
Keyon Vafa@keyonV20 Jun 2024
New paper: How can you tell if a transformer has the right world model? We trained a transformer to predict directions for NYC taxi rides. The model was good. It could find shortest paths between new points But had it built a map of NYC? We reconstructed its map and found this:
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William Orchard retweeted
François Chollet
@fchollet11 Jun 2024
Here's the thing: what current AI (e.g. LLMs) is really doing is memorizing millions of patterns seen in human-generated data, and reapplying them on new inputs. That works great when you're dealing with a well-known problem – until you introduce any amount of novelty.
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For those who don't subscribe to the New Yorker, I've taken the trouble of screenshotting the entire article. (Sorry, New Yorker! As many people as possible need to read this.) 1/25
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I'm in LA for @Conf_CLeaR presenting work I did at Amazon on Root Cause Analysis (arxiv.org/abs/2311.04806)! I loved CLeaR last year and am super excited to be attending again this year. If anyone wants to chat all things RCA, come find me! 🥚🔄🐔
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Come on, sit down, take a cookie, and learn about *scAbsolute: measuring single-cell ploidy and replication status* led by @mschndr11 genomebiology.biomedcentral.…

scAbsolute: measuring single-cell ploidy and replication status

Genome Biology - Cancer cells often exhibit DNA copy number aberrations and can vary widely in their ploidy. Correct estimation of the ploidy of single-cell genomes is paramount for downstream...

link.springer.com
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We are hiring! Join our lab for an exciting PhD at the intersection of AI, causal inference and neuroscience! Apply here: shorturl.at/jrxCT before January 15th!
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Join us in Cambridge! 2x group leader positions. Particular interest: computational biology including AI Core funded. Best start-up package you will get anywhere. jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/43302/
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