{"slug": "what-happens-when-a-hedgehog-story-prickles-its-way-into-the-bbc", "title": "What happens when a hedgehog story prickles its way into the BBC", "summary": "Researchers at Cambridge University used AI and a 20-petabyte geospatial model called TESSERA to help identify hedgehogs in images, leading to a BBC News article and a flurry of media appearances. The story highlights the challenges of training large AI models, including jury-rigged storage clusters under desks, and the intense national news cycle that followed.", "body_md": "[Silviu Petrovan](https://www.cambridgeconservation.org/about/people/dr-silviu-o-petrovan/) and I had quite a week appearing on [the BBC\nwebsite](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c202g60qrlpo) and a dozen radio\nand TV shows talking about the applications of AI to [saving hedgehogs](https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/hedgehog-mapping).\nI thought I'd jot down a \"behind the scenes\" so other academics get a sense\nof what to expect when a research story hits the national news cycle. Mostly,\nmake sure you have a clear couple of days to deal with live media appearances\nwith just a few hours notice and don't wear a rumpled shirt to the office!\n\nZoe Kleinman from the BBC pinged me after [hearing from Vultr](https://geotessera.org/blog/2026-03-30-training-and-inference-at-scale)\nabout the TESSERA v1 geospatial foundation model we've been developing here. I grabbed [Silviu Petrovan](https://www.cambridgeconservation.org/about/people/dr-silviu-o-petrovan/) and [Kevin Cochrane](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevincochrane) from\n[Vultr](https://www.vultr.com) and we had a brisk 25-minute chat on Teams with Zoe and her producer.\nThis was all very stress-free and just like talking to anyone else, since it wasn't a live segment where every word had to be perfect.\nZoe published [the article on hedgehogs](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c202g60qrlpo) later that day straight onto the BBC website.\n\nI hadn't realised before this just how widely read the BBC site is, as it has\nover [95% of UK adults](https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/documents/ara-2023-24-our-audiences.pdf)\nusing it and [over half a billion unique visitors per month](https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2025/bbc-reaches-record-audience-digitally-annual-report-and-accounts).\n\nTo be able to accurately identify the tiny creatures and other objects in image data, the Tessera system had to be trained on vast amounts of data — with around 20 petabytes, or the equivalent of 10 billion standard digital photos, used to build it.\n\nAfter reaching the limits of the computing power allocated to the university, researchers installed additional processors under their desks to keep the process going. --\n\n[Zoe Kleinman, BBC News, May 2026]\n\nI chortled when reading that last paragraph about 'under their desks' as I'd mentioned that over dinner to Zoe back at the [OpenUK AI Impact Summit roundtable](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/path-to-uk-india-ai-summit) a few months ago that [Amanda Brock](https://amandabrock.com/) invited me to. The jury-rigging is, for the record, entirely true, since we've had to cobble\ntogether a [gigantic storage cluster](https://www.tunbury.org/2026/03/27/ceph-expansion/)\nwhich we've only recently been able to [move offsite](https://www.tunbury.org/2026/04/17/cephfs-to-s3/).\n\nThe way these radio sessions work is that a researcher gives you a call ahead of\nthe live slot, checks audio *(tip: don't use Airpods as they sound echo-y, just\nspeak normally into the phone handset instead)*, and then gives you a time for\nthe live slot when they'll phone (over Facetime in my case as I have an\niPhone).\n\nWhen the call comes in, your audio is mixed in with the radio show running in the background (but muted), and then before you know it you're live on national radio with millions of listeners talking to the presenter! They only call a few minutes before, presumably so that you don't get too nervous thinking about it all.\n\nAfter this, the TV crews showed up to Cambridge to film pieces for television.\nSince it's exam term and College is in a [quiet period](https://www.pem.cam.ac.uk/current-students/policies-procedures-guidance/college-regulations)\nwe couldn't film onsite as we've done [in the past](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-docker-cover) and so\nused my office. They show up with a fairly portable set of camera and sound\nequipment and lugged it up the three floors to my office.\n\nThe first [TV slot](https://crank.recoil.org/w/dxXkfLYocHMbZtdkZLAc8R) was from BBC Look East, and I grabbed [David Coomes](https://coomeslab.org) and [Sadiq Jaffer](https://toao.com)\nat short notice from across the road to get some more team voices\nincluded.\n\nHaving my overgrown plant-filled office did seem like quite a nice idea on paper, but I think it came out less well when actually on TV since it's zoomed in and the light isn't even. I also hadn't reckoned on the sneaky 'reverse' shots the cameraman took which exposed the completely disorganised other half of my office away from the nice curated end!\n\nWe had about 30 minutes with the production team as well for this video,\nsince they also doubled as the camera crew. We discussed what shots to take, and they\ndid capture some gorgeous interactive views of the [TZE Explorer](https://tze.geotessera.org)\nwhich you can see in the clip above (and I love the studio intro which zooms in on the [parametric UMAP false colour TESSERA map](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~avsm2/cb2-pumap.svg) of Cambridgeshire).\n\nITV turned up later with another very patient cameraman to do a [\"down the\nline\" piece](https://crank.recoil.org/w/u34bg5FqQQ7618hN2DpsKe), which was a\nquite different structure from the previous one. The presenters were all in\nthe recording studio remotely, and I got wired in with an earpiece to listen in\nto them. The filming then happened as if I was in their studio, with\ncompositing to make it all work.\n\nThe other thing to know is that the university comms office is actually monitoring the media mentions of the University on an ongoing basis, since Cambridge regularly goes viral with some mention in the news almost every day.\n\nThe team sent me a weekly recap of all the mentions, including an interesting\nservice called [TVEyes](https://tveyes.com) who they pull clips of every mention across\nthe BBC, ITV, Sky and the regional stations and forward them on. This is the\nonly way I have any idea of knowing what actually went out in several cases since\nrebroadcasting a story is quite common.\n\nAnd thanks to an email from Rachael Pells, we also appear in the print edition\nof The Times (not online for some reason) with a lovely little section. I missed\nthis on the first outing until [Julia P.G. Jones](https://www.bangor.ac.uk/staff/sens/julia-patricia-gordon-jones-010356/en) mentioned her parents were [reading](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7465356682768928769/?dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287465380895626022912%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7465356682768928769%29&dashReplyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287465382045167276033%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7465356682768928769%29) the article!\n\nThe thing I was most worried about, going in, was the\nscience communication standard required for a national audience, especially\nsince [climate change messaging](https://doi.org/10.1080/1533015X.2026.2628164)\nis under such threat at the moment. Biodiversity, however, seems to trigger\na different (and perhaps more instinctual) response in people, and there\nwas no one *denying* that there exists a [crisis](https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2025-biodiversity-9recs) in biodiversity.\n\nInstead, much of the online conversation was about differences in opinion about\nhow to solve the land use problem from conflicting solutions (like [should we\ncull badgers](https://www.badgertrust.org.uk/post/badgers-and-hedgehogs-separating-fact-from-fiction-in-british-native-wildlife)\nto save the hogs). This feels like an area where [TESSERA](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/tessera),\n[Enki](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/enki) and [Conservation Evidence](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/ce) could all have a positive impact\nby making facts about the planet more available, so I feel quite energised\nabout that!\n\nI was very lucky that my collaborators (esp. [Silviu Petrovan](https://www.cambridgeconservation.org/about/people/dr-silviu-o-petrovan/)) in conservation\nare old hands at this sort of thing, and they kept the focus on the\ncore conservation message which is the thing most of interest to a\nnational audience.\n\nI also think I spent a bit too long talking about the innards\nof [TESSERA](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/tessera), and need to practise a few snappy lines about\nwhat it is at its essence. For example, [Sadiq Jaffer](https://toao.com) came up with the\nterm 'satellite fingerprint' to describe a TESSERA 10m tile, which seems hella\nsnappier than '128-dimensional embedding of Sentinel 1 and 2' when doing\nan elevator pitch.\n\nAll in all, I very much enjoyed the experience. It has completely\ndisrupted my already packed work-week, but I must have received a hundred\nmessages from friends who otherwise couldn't care less about my\nday-to-day research, and it gave the [project](https://geotessera.org/blog/2026-05-19-tessera-hedgehogs_1), [department](https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/tessera-ai-model-helping-protect-hedgehogs-space)\nand [College](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYnL2pTDkkb/) something to post about\nthat doesn't involve obscure functional programming! Thank you\nZoe Kleinman for taking the time to run this piece!", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-happens-when-a-hedgehog-story-prickles-its-way-into-the-bbc", "canonical_source": "https://anil.recoil.org/notes/hedgehog-tessera-week", "published_at": "2026-05-22 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-16 06:24:23.125941+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-research", "computer-vision", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["BBC", "Cambridge University", "Vultr", "Silviu Petrovan", "Zoe Kleinman", "Kevin Cochrane", "TESSERA", "OpenUK"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-happens-when-a-hedgehog-story-prickles-its-way-into-the-bbc", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-happens-when-a-hedgehog-story-prickles-its-way-into-the-bbc.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-happens-when-a-hedgehog-story-prickles-its-way-into-the-bbc.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-happens-when-a-hedgehog-story-prickles-its-way-into-the-bbc.jsonld"}}