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Romain Lacombe

@rlacombe.bsky.social
810 followers 280 following 79 posts

AI/ML⚡️& ChemE 🧪 @ Stanford. Past: founder Plume Labs (acquired by AccuWeather). Don’t be fooled by the tweets that I’ve got I’m still I’m still @rlacombe on X (and here). -> romainlacombe.com

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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
Excited to speak at the @stanforddata.bsky.social Sustainability Data Science conference today! I’ll be presenting ClimateX, our work on LLM confidence calibration in the climate science domain. 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2311.17107 💻 Code: github.com/rlacombe/Cli...
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Poster time! Fantastic workshop on experimental design in AI for Science today. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.17368 Workshop: edai4science.github.io
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Nobel laureate talk time! With David Baker at the Stanford experimental design in AI for Science today.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
🔔🔔 New bioML paper alert! 🔔🔔 We evaluate evolutionary protein structure prediction models using the geometric structure of non-canonical crosslinks from a rare class of post-translationally modified peptides. A thread. 🧵
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
"But you're so much more handsome than that!" – my beloved wife, when shown a Ghiblified selfie of ourselves. Right answer!! I'm swooning! 🥰🥰🥰
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 25/03/2025
This is much deeper than it sounds at first. Absolute nugget of wisdom.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
This is an excellent talk by @francesarnold.bsky.social at ACS this week. Worth a read! cen.acs.org/people/award...
cen.acs.org
Priestley Medal address 2025: A random (mostly) uphill walk
A version of this essay will be presented at the American Chemical Society Spring 2025 meeting by 2025 Priestley Medal winner Frances H. Arnold, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioeng...
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
LLMs are Farenheit 451 for digitized human knowledge. There’s something comforting knowing that the ghost of every written word will live on, for as long as we can preserve open weights, and the GPUs to bring them to life.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 04/01/2025
Chemical engineering rules everything around us. ⚗️ AI 🤖, bio 🧬, chips 💻, energy 🔋, fertilizers 🚜, materials ⛏️, space 🛰️ ... All the technologies shaping the world sit downstream from chemistry fundamentals. 👩‍🔬 Hold on to your periodic table and let's go! 🚀
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
Few things are more heart wrenching than a walk by a wild, pristine, remote beach at the confines of civilization… …only to find billions of tiny speckles of microplastics all over the sand, which we *know* will end up in our bodies by way of the food chain. Very sad.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
1 failure per 1000 GPU•days is the going hardware MTF rate for large training runs these days. #NeurIPS2024
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Craziest talk of the day so far: you can recognize which room someone stands in with embeddings of firing rate maps of their place cells neurons! #NeurIPS2024
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Deep learning is chemical engineering for information: layers are process units, diffusion is transport, entropy is the loss function… Don’t believe me? Then why is the NeurIPS opening talk literally starting with the Haber Bosch process!?
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Made it to #NeurIPS2024! Here until Sunday, ping me for coffee, a walk and talk, or some Tim Hortons maple glazed donuts! 🇨🇦
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
I used to add little incandescent light bulbs in my notes, for highlights.💡 But it’s time to decarbonize. 🔋 So now I add little LEDs! ⚡️
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
We can just fix things.
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Rachel Thomas @math-rachel.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
An analogy of the differences between bulk RNA-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, and spatial transcriptomics #multiomics2024 10/
bulk RNA-seq: a big pile of different colored legs all mixed up
single-cell RNA-seq: small piles of Legos organized by color
spatial transcriptomics: image of the brain built out of Legos
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Air pollution makes you dumb. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Engineering is the ultimate LEGO set. Piece some unit processes together, add sensors and a PCB to control them, break a few molecular bonds and train a neural net to run the whole thing, and don’t forget your economics so you can keep going. Is anything more fun than this!? 😀
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry for the Future" is looking more prescient every day. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/c...
nytimes.com
The U.S. Is Building an Early Warning System to Detect Geoengineering (Gift Article)
Balloon launches from around the world are part of a new kind of global alarm system: One that can detect if another country tries to dim the sun.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Causality is correlation with a story. Change my mind.
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Anna Mowat @annamowat.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
This feels likes it pulled right of the Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson #climatechange #greenhousegas
nytimes.com
The U.S. Is Building an Early Warning System to Detect Geoengineering
Balloon launches from around the world are part of a new kind of global alarm system: One that can detect if another country tries to dim the sun.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Yesterday's heavy fog lifted through the night, and it's a beautiful sunny morning in California. 🌴🇺🇸 Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 🦃🍠🥧🙏❤️
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Oregon Zoo @oregonzoo.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Happy Chompsgiving!
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
"- Please generate a beautiful picture of a strange attractor. - Here's the visual representation of a strange attractor, blending intricate and dynamic patterns with a cosmic aesthetic. Let me know if you'd like any adjustments!" What do y'all think about ChatGPT's chaos theory art skills?
Visual representation of a strange attractor generated by ChatGPT, blending intricate and dynamic patterns with a cosmic aesthetic.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Aw that’s incredibly nice of you to say! 🥹🙏 I return the compliment, follow Ben and get a front row seat to the latest in AI for science! ⤵️
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Still far from my old follower count, but seeing scientists collectively more here over the past few days has been nothing short of extraordinary. Key question: how to keep quality of interactions robust over time?
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
'I think'
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
A vertical takeoff of life science with #AI LLLMs. Publication of 10 new foundation models of Proteins, DNA, RNA, methylation, cells, and interactions, evolution, and design in the past couple of weeks! Unprecedented progress, reviewed in the new Ground Truths erictopol.substack.com/p/learning-t...
Covers of Science and Nature journals in the past 2 weeks denoting remarkable progress of life science with A.I. tools
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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
I feel like climate change can feel a bit mystical because the earth is, y’know, pretty complex as a system. But just tossing a, “CO2 is transparent to visible light but absorbs infrared light” in there just says “this isn’t that complex — climate deniers are denying /physics/…which is cringe.”
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Make it work. 🧱 Make it right. ✅ Make it fast! 🚴‍♂️💨
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
RhoFold+, nucleotide language model for accurate 3d structure prediction of RNA, from the Wyss institute: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Accurate RNA 3D structure prediction using a language model-based deep learning approach - Nature Methods
RhoFold+ is an end-to-end language model-based deep learning method to predict RNA three-dimensional structures of single-chain RNAs from sequences.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
This is insane: cluster representations of molecules by the *distance between their gzip-compressed strings* and you get better results than modern GNNs. 🤯 pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...
pubs.rsc.org
Learning on compressed molecular representations
Last year, a preprint gained notoriety, proposing that a k-nearest neighbour classifier is able to outperform large-language models using compressed text as input and normalised compression distance (...
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
you can just gzip things pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...
pubs.rsc.org
Learning on compressed molecular representations
Last year, a preprint gained notoriety, proposing that a k-nearest neighbour classifier is able to outperform large-language models using compressed text as input and normalised compression distance (...
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World of Engineering @engineers.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
You are the result of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it.
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Hannah Ritchie @hannahritchie.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
The world has already eradicated smallpox. Polio is the next disease we could eradicate. Here's how we got to where we are now, mostly thanks to the polio vaccine. From our work on Polio: ourworldindata.org/polio
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Chemical engineering is the most fascinating field because mass transfers govern everything around us: 🦠 our cells are networks of enzymes 🩸 our body is a system of systems 🔋 our economy a flow of mass/energy 🌎 our planet a giant C, N, O cycle 🪐 thermo and kinetics rule the universe What else?
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Proud hubby! 🥹🥰
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Ladies and gentlemen, my better half! Making my heart sing and my skies always blue! 💙🦋
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
This feels like magic: shine a light, kill a tumor. 🤯 Cool paper on exposure to light from an organic LED to trigger apoptosis in mice.
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American Chemical Society @acs.org · 20/11/2024
Hi #ChemSky! 👋 We see you! Please give us a moment to get settled here.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Science 🤝 Startups “In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed.” – William Ernest Henley
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
More ways to degrade PFAS! 🧪🦾
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Key question in climate: will the predicted 2100 temperature asymptote curve keep decreasing, and how fast? We're still expecting +2.6ºC, but that's down from +3.6ºC a decade ago.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Wow ok, this tracks with the massive spike in activity here.
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
TIL that China has built more solar capacity in the last year than the US have in their entire history. The race for clean energy abundance is on! 🚀 globalenergymonitor.org/report/china...
globalenergymonitor.org
China continues to lead the world in wind and solar, with twice as much capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined
China is cementing its position as the global leader in renewables development with180 GW of utility-scale solar and 159 GW of wind power already under construction1 .The total of the two is nearly tw...
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Not a fan of social media balkanization, but it's cosmically beautiful to see a decentralized platform spawned out of the late Twitter now seizing the mandate of heaven. 🦋
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Surprised by the number of folks suddenly following me here. How did y’all find me?
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Romain Lacombe @rlacombe.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
just setting up my bsky
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