Last week, a sizable fraction of OPIG headed to “The Plough” near Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, for our OPIG Retreat (a.k.a. “OPIGtreat”). Some of us travelled on Monday by train, encountering a biblical deluge, a darkness resembling a train tunnel but filled with pelting rain and bath-tubs of water washing down the train’s windows — and lightning strikes every 30s while changing in Bath Spa…

Undeterred, and either shuttled by the fabulous Anita from Bradford on Avon station, or walking on foot, we arrived at our lovely destination and home for the week.

The fact that the converted pub-cum-youth hostel might be confused with an actual pub also called “The Plough” might have been relevant information before setting up our grocery delivery with a leading national supermarket chain — that helpfully does not allow customers to edit the delivery address… Enter Anita and Clare, intercepting the errant deliveries and ferrying them back to home base.

Delicious meals were prepared and enjoyed together, sometimes inside and at others under the vine-draped pergola, not-to-mention the yummy Bangladeshi rice pudding Clare made for Rebonto’s birthday.

We had a fantastic set of talks on a range of topics neatly summarized by Charlotte’s final quiz:

Aside from discovering the inner workings of a Minecraft(!) implementation of a GPT (with 439 million blocks and 5.09 million parameters) to how clinically approved therapeutic antibodies work; from PufferLib for reinforcement learning to the similarities and differences between teaching machines and teaching children (stickers work on humans, it turns out…!); from the power of AI in sports to the value of open source drug discovery, there were a fantastic set of talks spread throughout the week — not unlike our very own Gordon Research Conference.

We also learned that sitting in an ‘L’-shape with one’s feet against the wall is very relaxing and good for blood flow in the brain…