iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I am going to be in Boston for the IEEE VIS conference Nov 9 -13 this year! I am keen to talk dimension reduction, clustering, and data maps (UMAP, HDBSCAN, DataMapPlot). If you are going to be at VIS, or are just in Boston, and want to grab a coffee, please reach out. DMs open.

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Posit @posit.co · 08/09/2026

Leland McInnes built UMAP to help humans (not AI) make sense of messy piles of images, documents, and video. His full thinking on data, taste, and exploration is on The Test Set. Listen now: posit.co/thetestset/episode/smuggle…

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David Gasquez @davidgasquez.com · 17/06/2026

Agents are everywhere now but is worth remembering that there are still so many cool things we can do with good ol matrix factorization and embeddings. No LLMs required.

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grant @grantcuster.com · 25/06/2026

Wikimedia concepts embedded and then mapped to a sphere with UMAP. Trying out topic clusters as continents. Not really sure where it's going.

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CreativeApplications.Net @creativeapps.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

New in the Archives Browser (Members): Semantic Space — CAN archives as a 3D cloud. Every post embedded, mapped with UMAP, clustered with k-means. Hover for titles, click to trace relatives + search. #threejs → www.creativeapplications.net/archives-bro...

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TMLR Published Papers @tmlr-pub.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

The Shape of Attraction in UMAP: Exploring the Embedding Forces in Dimensionality Reduction Mohammad Tariqul Islam, Jason W. Fleischer Action editor: Dmitry Kobak openreview.net/forum?id=fdPNhqav5G #embedding #cluster #dimensionality

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Kevin A. Scott, PhD @sculpturatus.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Want to compare your molecules to FDA-approved drugs or the Enamine 10k library? I made an open-source tool that visualizes physicochemical properties and metrics like Böttcher complexity as 2D/3D PCA or UMAP plots. Fast and easy. Mac only. github.com/sculpturatus...

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Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D. @brianckeegan.com · 23/05/2026

things are getting hot and heavy here tonight

import umap
import hdbscan
from sklearn.cluster import KMeans
from sklearn.metrics import adjusted_rand_score, normalized_mutual_info_score

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Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Need to run your latent space exploration inside a Jupyter Notebook instead? No worries! We have got you covered there as well! (5/n)

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Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

🔭 Paper Day! 🧪 Introducing Hyrax — an astro-focused ML framework built for the era of Rubin, Roman, and Euclid Handles the entire ML lifecycle: from data acquisition → training → inference → interactive latent-space discovery. pip install hyrax (1/n) 🧵 #astronomy #astrocoding #extragalactic

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Pablo Marcos-Manchón @jazzmaniatico.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Can neural representations from different people be translated into a shared space without paired data? In our preprint, "Platonic Representations in the Human Brain: Unsupervised Recovery of Universal Geometry", with Rishi Jha and @fuentemilla.bsky.social, we test this using fMRI 🧵👇

Marcos-Manchón, P., Jha, R., & Fuentemilla, L. (2026). Platonic Representations in the Human Brain: Unsupervised Recovery of Universal Geometry. arXiv [q-Bio.NC]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20496

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Aritra Ghosh I অরিত্র ঘোষ @aritraghsh09.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Showcase #2: 🔭 Cluster-Scale Lens hunting with Hyrax in collab with @khullar.bsky.social UMAP + DBSCAN found a galaxy cluster overdensity in @vrubinobs.bsky.social DP1 → human-in-the-loop spotted a lensed arc behind it → Euclid VIS confirmed presence Gemini follow-up incoming 👀 (9/n)

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Vicki @vickiboykis.com · 19/05/2026

New post: Tagging my blog with BERTopic and LLMs. I suspect as token costs increase, we'll see more blended traditional ML/LLM systems. And, in general, they work really well! vickiboykis.com/2026/05/18/t...

vickiboykis.com

Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs

LLMs mean you still need a human in the loop, but in a different part

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Nezar Abdennur @nvictus.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

High-dimensional data is hard to understand. But is it truly cursed? To help you build better intuition for high-dimensional datasets, @lekschas.de and I developed dtour, a visualization tool for smoothly navigating through data projections.

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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Seth Levine gave a great talk on the art of clustering at ODSC East that really digs in the practical realities of getting the most out of your data. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtZ3...

youtube.com

The Art of Clustering: The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful by Seth Levine, Contentsquare

YouTube video by Open Data Science and AI Conference

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Vincent D. Warmerdam @koaning.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

People should not sleep on the new EVoC clustering algorithm. It's got me rethinking a lot of my widgets and bulk labelling tricks. youtu.be/1roN51JXuX8

youtube.com

marimo

The Most Satisfying Method to Explore Embeddings

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Ada Homolova @adahomolova.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

What’s the world searching for right now? Explore the past 24 hours in combined google trends and local news sources from 125 countries. Similar topics cluster together. Focus on the clusters or the outliers. 🐸 👉 trends.datafrosch.fun #dataviz #dataexploration worldnews #UMAP #localmodels

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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

EVoC is a library designed specifically for fast clustering of high dimensional embedding vectors. It can produce high quality clusters extremely efficiently, and requires little to no hyperparameter tuning. Better clustering than UMAP + HDBSCAN; faster clustering than KMeans.

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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

There's a new release of fast-hdbscan out now on PyPI that adds some major new features. - A PLSCAN implementation based on work by Jelmer Bot - Support for diverse metrics via PyNNDescent - A powerful "cannot-link" constraint system for semi-supervised clustering by Richard Hakim

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Daniel van Strien @danielvanstrien.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

One of the nicest things about Nvidia model releases is that they ship the training data. What does it look like? I sampled 250k examples from 24 datasets in the Nemotron post-training v3 collection and built an interactive Embedding Atlas to explore it.

Interactive Embedding Atlas visualization of 250,000 training examples from NVIDIA's Nemotron post-training v3 collection, colored by category. Distinct clusters are visible for Math (blue, 56k), Code (orange, 45k), Agentic (green, 41k), Instruction Following (red, 25k), Finance (purple, 18k), Multilingual (brown, 18k), Science (pink, 18k), Safety (grey, 16k), and Identity (yellow, 8k). A selected point shows an example from the Agentic function-calling dataset: "I need to know the weight of the creature that can evolve into a Fire Dragon."

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John F Wu @jwuphysics.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

This week I'll be delivering a talk and leading a tutorial for the Language AI in Space Sciences Workshop in Baltimore, hosted at STScI. So excited to see folks from all disciplines join the conversation -- including astronomers, engineers, computer scientists, librarians, and linguists.

Conference banner that states the text:

Language AI in Space Sciences Workshop (March 9th - 12th, 2026)

imposed over what looks like a JWST image of a galaxy cluster, and the contours that specify where some astronomy literature categories live in a UMAP-ed embedding space.

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Lynn Cherny @arnicas.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Han Jiao (ex jina Ai ceo) built mlx apple silicon clustering libs for umap, tsne etc github.com/hanxiao/mlx-...

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David Kouřil @dvdkouril.xyz · 27/02/2026

playing around with umap-js today.

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David Picard @davidpicard.eurosky.social · 28/02/2026

Any sufficiently large k-nn is indistinguishable from magic 🧙‍♂️

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business goose🪿 @goose.art · 10/02/2026

become unclusterable

screenshot of map.sky.boo with a circle around a dot way off the main clustered area, a modal at the bottom right shows it as "Justin Kyle" daddysgaygarden13.bsky.social

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Theo Sanderson @theo.io · 08/02/2026

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

bluesky-map.theo.io

Bluesky Map

Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

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Elisabetta Versace @elisabettaversace.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Our new pre-print shows how unsupervised clustering methods can identify biologically meaningful differences in early vocal production, with no human feedback. @antorrisi.bsky.social has led this interdisciplinary collaboration based on computational methods + #chicks 🐣 arxiv.org/abs/2601.12203

A) Dendrogram of the development dataset showing the clustering structure and optimal cut points, and spectrograms of representative calls extracted from cluster 0 and cluster 1. Within the main
clusters, we observed further branching; B) UMAP projection divided into 𝐾 = 2 clusters using HAC.

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⚡️🌙 @dystopiabreaker.xyz · 26/01/2026

here's a fun side project i've been working on: i compiled a joint text<>audio embedding model to a fast coreml pipeline, and built a very fast (~400ms for 50k samples, can scale to millions) UMAP dimensionality reduction GPU impl in mlx. using it to browse music libraries and do sample sim search

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arXiv cs.LG Machine Learning @cslg-bot.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Xiaobin Li, Run Zhang: Understanding and Improving UMAP with Geometric and Topological Priors: The JORC-UMAP Algorithm arxiv.org/abs/2601.16552 arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16552 arxiv.org/html/2601.16552

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Vincent D. Warmerdam @koaning.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

I miss the days where you'd see blogposts with clever analyses on datasets, maths and data science tricks. That's why, as an experiment, we're starting a new moderated subreddit. People can share/promote their notebooks and you can use RSS to subscribe. Please join and share!

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Christopher Akiki @cakiki.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

UMAP connectivity plots of 3,627 chess openings from the @lichess.org datasets (huggingface.co/datasets/Lic...)

3 by 3 grid of networks color-mapped with "plasma" and with edge-bundling. Lung looking structure.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

I think it's important to note though that in spite of those incentives, the direction of the last two years has been more fungibility, *not* lock-in. And open source is the wrong fight here: when lock-in comes it will look more like the lock-in that Amazon or Uber have than Microsoft Office…

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Janis Keck @keckjanis.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

New preprint! Have you ever wondered, what are these fuzzy simplicial sets, the theoretical framework behind e.g. UMAP? Here we show that you may simply see them as marginal distributions over simplicial sets. This provides a generative model for UMAP. (1/2) arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899

arxiv.org

Probabilistic Foundations of Fuzzy Simplicial Sets for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction

Fuzzy simplicial sets have become an object of interest in dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, most prominently through their role in UMAP. However, their definition through tools from alg...

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luokai @luok.ai · 11/11/2025

Space DJ turns genre embeddings into a playable galaxy—pilot a ship, the music follows. 🚀 Key stats 768→128 PCA compression; 3D UMAP projection; three.js rendering; autopilot drift; high‑dim neighbors surfacing hidden similarities.

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mmalex @mmalex.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

via the magic of laion_clap embeddings and umap, my live coding thingy has a sample browser at last!

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Christopher Akiki @cakiki.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

I made this annotated scatter plot of 1 million FineWeb-Edu documents for @sashamtl.bsky.social's new TED talk.

Scatterplot of a document corpus with cluster information in the form of colors and cluster labels. Includes labels like computing, mental health, religion, etc.

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Christopher Akiki @cakiki.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Also really love how organic the plot looks with "inferno" (left) and "viridis" (right).

organic looking network representing the internet BGP nodes. Inferno colormap.

organic looking network representing the internet BGP nodes. Viridis colormap.

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Christopher Akiki @cakiki.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

Map of the internet: 1.3M nodes (BGP)

organic looking graph of the BGP nodes of the internet. black and white

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Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

The video of my talk at SciPy on DataMapPlot is up at last. If you make t-SNE or UMAP plots the talk provides some guidance on how to make plots most effective, and introduces a library to help make that easier. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iBh...

youtube.com

Leland McInnes - DataMapPlot: Rich Tools for UMAP | SciPy 2025

YouTube video by SciPy

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

Despite the gutting of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the dept of Ed *did* manage to release 2024 college major counts in the usual format, so I can run it through the same code I do every year. First off, the change since peak of the largest fields -- another year of drops.

A line chart captioned "The big humanities majors were mostly still falling in 2024", showing drops since 2008 for most humanities fields between 10% (Study of the Arts) to 68% (religion) with history, english, and foreign languages all clustered around 50-55%

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⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) @patcon.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

I'm very much a learner, but you're maybe asking if aspects of matrix factorisation approaches to dimensionality reduction apply here. But LocalMAP is a KNN approach, with a matrix factorisation initialisation. h/t @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social for his attempts to describe these youtu.be/9iol3Lk6kyU

youtu.be

A Bluffer's Guide to Dimension Reduction - Leland McInnes

YouTube video by PyData

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UniReps @unireps.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

📢 Save the date! Join us for the next @ellis.eu x UniReps Speaker Series! 📅 27th August – 16:00 CEST 📍https://ethz.zoom.us/j/66426188160 🎙️ Speakers: Keynote by @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social & Flash Talk by Yu (Demi) Qin 🔔 Stay updated by joining our Google group: groups.google.com/u/2/g/ellis-...

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Dominik Moritz @domoritz.de · 01/08/2025

🚀 We've just open-sourced Embedding Atlas – a tool for exploring large embedding spaces through rich, interactive visualizations 📊.

Screenshot of embedding atlas showing the embedding view on the left, a table at the bottom and charts on the right.

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AstroArxiv @astroarxiv.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Meteoroid stream identification with HDBSCAN unsupervised clustering algorithm. Eloy Peña-Asensio et. al. arxiv.org/abs/2507.01501

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Ever wanted to pan through the latent🌌 space of TikTok videos? Made using the amazing toponymy and datamapplot from @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social and data from mine and @jurgenpfeffer.bsky.social 's first complete TikTok slice. link below

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