iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 29/06/2026

Meet Leafy 🌿 The newest member of the #GenesisMission. Built on Reachy Mini from Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face, Leafy is another step toward an experiment you can talk to. A physical avatar for a complete agentic stack for autonomous phenotyping. #Robotics

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 13/04/2026

Exploring a “Dark Knight Agent” built to observe ruthlessly, test competing hypotheses, and guide experiments under uncertainty. A superhero-inspired detective for science. And bats. From noisy data → to system insight. lmyork.github.io/MVBOT1-Status/ #GenesisMission #AI #AutonomousLabs

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 27/03/2026

Do you know how to get your data AI-ready? Just upload to Zenodo.org with as good a description as you can muster and call it a day. Simply sharing has always been the most important part of open science. #GenesisMission #OpenScience

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 25/03/2026

Spent the past year preparing for the DOE Genesis Mission—upskilling in robotics and AI. Programmed robots first. Now shifting to teaching them. From controlled automation to adaptable, dynamic lab systems. #GenesisMission #LabAutomation

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 19/03/2026

A year ago I started with a cobot and block code. Now: a fully enclosed, safety-integrated, Python-driven autonomous lab system with imaging, custom hardware, and a full GUI. Next: streaming data, agents, and talking to the lab. The future of autonomous labs is open. #GenesisMission #OpenScience

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 16/03/2026

Trying something new: moving from AI-assisted coding toward agentic engineering. Before writing code, we defined: • instructions • target architecture • phased development plan The idea: give AI a clear blueprint instead of a blank page. #AIforScience #ScientificComputing #GenesisMission

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 25/02/2026

Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? - The Joker Sometimes it's nice to just watch.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 23/02/2026

Forced a collision in our plate imaging robot to demonstrate something more important than automation: safe failure and deterministic recovery. Autonomy only works if safety is engineered first. Agentic layer coming up. #AutonomousLabs #GenesisMission

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 21/02/2026

LLMs don’t actually use tools. They’re stateless: text in, text out. “Tool use” is orchestration — structured text that systems parse and execute in between. #AutonomousLabs #GenesisMission

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 11/02/2026

Excited to share our first fully integrated prototype, safety-compliant robotic plate imaging workcell at ORNL—complete with enclosure, Banner SC10 controller, door interlocks, and protective stop with a uFactory xArm 5. #GenesisMission #AutonomousLabs #Robotics #OpenScience #LabAutomation

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 09/02/2026

Excited to demo the first safety control system for our robotic workcell. As labs become more automated, it’s easy for safety to lag - getting it right early has been eye-opening. More to share soon as the COBOT Autonomous Lab continues to develop. #MachineSafety #AutonomousLabs #GenesisMission

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 28/09/2025

I've been working on this then it hit me. Is this RhizoVision Tron? With open hardware and software, we can accelerate root, soil, and microbiome research. First, we have to solve the segmentation challenge of roots on soil so everyone can do it. www.rhizovision.com

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 22/05/2025

At the IPG Root Biology Symposium at the University of Missouri. ChatGPT helped summarize the abstract book in graphical form. Great speakers and familiar faces of root biologists. Thanks to the organizers for inviting me and looking forward to telling you all more about RhizoVision Transformer.

Man smiling and doing the peace sign in front of the life science building at University of Missouri

Graphical output from chat GDP generated by asking the model to summarize the abstract book in a graphical form. It talks about advancing root biology, root architecture, multiomics and AI root microbe interactions abiotic stress, cross species and translational insights, genetic and molecular regulationary development and species and parole through imaging and modeling

A beautiful sunset over the skyline of forest from downtown Columbia, Missouri

Recognizing the sponsors. Thank you. Includes many departments within the University of Missouri companies like Bayer and cortava Danforth issr the ippn are gone and others

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 06/05/2025

Who makes these UIs? I just want to copy and paste it.

screenshot of journal page where the 'cite' button brings up save and export options but not the actual citation.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 04/05/2025

Expanded the vegetable garden again this year - on the right side there. We enjoy planting and harvests throughout the year. Tennessee has a great climate for gardens but the clay soil needs work. What about you? Anybody else garden?

Photo of fenced in vegetable garden with exposed soil and some plants in a yard with a wooden fence behind it and some visible houses and trees farther away

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 17/04/2025

A boy and his drill press. Drilling is an essential part of biology.

A man with black-framed glasses standing next to a drill press with his hand on the lever.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 21/01/2025

After a hot day working with switchgrass across the road in August 2023! I thought it was neat, glad it was restored and hope to see it again.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 11/01/2025

The snow lay as a cold blanket. Today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA - a beautiful place to live and work. Looking north to my roots in Kentucky.

A snowy view towards mountains in the distance and down on a neighborhood with several snow covered houses and trees. White clouds and a peak of blue sky

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 08/01/2025

Not long ago we dreamed up this fungal imaging experiment comparing two species growing on 3 levels of nitrogen in glucose minimal media. 5 reps. I did the best I could to get clear, daily images for 12 days. Big kudos to @lagergren.bsky.social and Anand for doing initial analysis in 1! day.

360 images of fungi growing on petri dishes arranged by two species Fusarium and Linemannia, 3 nitrogen levels, and 12 days. Fusarium looks red and linemannia white. You can see they grow over time but reduced nitrate reduces their growth.

A graph depicting time series area with the two strains colored by green and red, and the 3 nitrogen levels depicted by shapes and line type. Can see FG in red grows faster and for both species growth rate only a little affected from 100% to 10% N, but greatly from 10% to 1%.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 06/01/2025

Do you want to study roots? We released RhizoVision Explorer 3 years ago and now have 12,500+ downloads. RVE is free, open-source software for analyzing root images. The website covers common reproducible imaging approaches. Feel free to ask any questions! Version 2 coming! www.rhizovision.com

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 31/12/2024

So fungal people. Is this a thing? Measuring respiration of fungus growing on agar in petri dish? Well if not, it is now. 🥸

In lab. Imager, stack of petri dishes, clear enclosure with dish attached to infrared gas analyzer, barcode scanner, and laptop logging increase in CO2.

Overhead shot of petri dish with white and red fusarium fungus inside clear enclosure with tubing ports attached for gas flux analysis.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 25/12/2024

OK well here's one way to get a lot of images making use of barcodes for sample IDs and staying focused to acquire two different light source images per petri dish by manually flipping the switches. About a minute a dish. Sped up 10x. Merry Christmas and Happy Solstice.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 25/12/2024

Cultured fungi can be really beautiful and interesting to look at. We should take more pictures.

A round petri dish with a red fungal plug in the center and white hyphae spreading away radially across the entire plate.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 16/12/2024

My colleague @lagergren.bsky.social leading a hackathon to teach two interns, Jack and Janou, and our software developer, Anand, how to build a convolutional neural network for image analysis from scratch on their journey to be leaders in AI for research!

Image of man standing in front of 3 other men sitting around a table with laptops. The standing man is pointing to a large screen with computer code as the others look on.

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 30/11/2024

I thought I was done but using the _atproto from the linked Bluesky directions didn't work. Scratched my head a minute and realized back in the DNS record, I might need to add the new subdomain like in this screenshot. This allowed me to verify back in Bluesky with my new handle

Screenshot of DNS record adding the custom subdomain to the _atproto just. Success!

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 30/11/2024

So, being a master of Googling, I pulled up the link below, and added a new domain forwarding rule pointing subdomain larrymyork to the main website. I'm still not sure if it should be temporary or permanent? support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/art...

Screenshot of squarespace preferences with settings for domain forwarding as described in the post

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 10/06/2024

Awesome to see @guillaumelobet.bsky.social @benjamindelory.bsky.social Jeff and Elsa at the International Society of Root Research meeting in Leipzig. All roots all the time is so much fun! Learned a ton. #ISRR12 #ISSR24

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Larry M. York @larrymyork.phenotyper.com · 15/02/2024

Not the best setup but taking clear images of the rhizobox with a colleague from the Environmental Sciences Division at ORNL

Image of light box with rhizobox inside and camera facing

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