Academic-Life on Yuval Bloch — Complexity & Ecology

Three Years, Six Semesters: What Writing My Thesis Actually Taught Me

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I submitted my thesis. It’s the kind of milestone that should feel like a finish line, but it doesn’t quite — I still have to defend it, and I’m in the middle of submitting a paper drawn from it to Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Still, by the time that review process wraps up, in this journal or another, I’ll likely already be somewhere else in my life. So this feels like the right moment to look back at the continuous stretch of work that’s ending today, even if fragments of it will follow me a while longer.

Three lessons on Bayesian optimization, and one on humility

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, I told my advisor that my thesis was ready. We decided to delay the submission a little — partly so he could find a referee, and partly so I could keep my scholarship while I converted the thesis into a paper and made sure my code was reproducible.

Three days ago, I finished building a simple pipeline that would let future researchers reproduce all of my results without needing me around. I ran a quick test to confirm that I could reproduce everything without diving back into the code myself — and when I ran a full reproduction through the pipeline, I got completely different results.

Figaro - or how we create the app we need

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Hackathon for App Development

Over the last three months I’ve been part of developing MIRA — a Multilayer Interactive Rendering Application — which we’ve already presented as a preprint on arXiv. I wrote about how AI heavily shaped that development process on my blog, but the most important conclusion from the whole experience is this: small-to-medium app development has become genuinely easy, thanks both to AI and to the modern ecosystem of browser deployment tools and JavaScript libraries.

Developing MIRA

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three months ago, my PI Shai Pilosoph offered me a spot on a project he had already started: a new tool for visualizing multilayer ecological networks. I was skeptical. Already on an extension for my thesis, I was afraid to take on anything new when I was already stretched thin. But he showed me what he had built so far, and we talked about how publishing it could support the field in a meaningful way — and add something real to my résumé. So I decided to join, as second author, alongside my colleague Shir who stepped in as the lead writer.

The Devil Is in the Details: Modeling Small-Scale Land-Use Change in Madagascar

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🖼️ The Poster

If you are viewing this on a mobile device, you can view the full PDF below or Download the PDF here.

📌 Introduction & Research Gap

Land use represents the fundamental interface between humanity and nature. From urban centers to remote tropical regions, environmental modification critically affects human health, disease exposure, and vulnerability to natural disasters.

Land-use change is a primary driver of global crises:

My Journey at the an open University: A Candid Look at the Experience

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My Journey with Israel’s Open University

Open Universities are unique institutions that combines a long history of remote learning with an open admissions policy. they offers people from all walks of life the chance to earn a respected degree and is a well-established concept worldwide.

In Israel, the Open University has been making waves. Its computer science graduates now earn the highest salaries in the country, even surpassing those from the prestigious Technion. However, a degree from the Open University is earned in a very different way than at a traditional university, and it’s not the right fit for everyone.