Blog on Constantin Orasan's website

Tulips at Wisley Garden

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a member of RHS Wisley Garden for over four years now, and no matter when I visit, I’m always struck by how much there is to see in bloom. Even in winter, when most plants are resting, you can still find pockets of colour inside the greenhouses.

Every visit seems to end the same way: I take far more photos than I planned. And every time I get home, I tell myself I should upload a few to my website, not just because the flowers are so beautiful, but also to keep track of how blooming times change from year to year.

Christmas market in Craiova

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

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being an invited speaker the 3rd edition of the Conference on Recent Advances in Digital Humanities. The event was excellent, as expected, and my talk on LLMs and accessibility was warmly received. The real surprise, though, was discovering the city of Craiova and its Christmas market.

Craiova is quite far from my hometown, so I never managed to visit it while I was living in Romania. After accepting the conference invitation, I learned about the Christmas market and wasn’t sure what to expect. It turned out to be remarkable. It was voted the best Christmas market, and after seeing it, I completely understand why. There is even a flying Santa Claus. The market was crowded every evening, but I still managed to capture a few 360-degree photos of the main square.

EmpASR at CIOL 2025

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On 15 March 2025, I had the opportunity to present the EmpASR project at the CIOL Interpreters Day 2025 alongside my colleagues Sabine Braun and Diana Singureanu. The title of the presentation was Pros and Cons of AI and Technology in interpreting: A research-informed perspective from the University of Surrey. Despite the fact that we were able to present only preliminary findings from our interviews, the presentation was very well received and generated quite a bit of discussion. The slides of our presentation are available below.

The shell grotto

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This summer, I spent a few days of holiday in Kent, and one of the most intriguing attractions I came across was the Shell Grotto in Margate. I decided to explore it, and it turned out to be an unforgettable experience. The grotto is truly a hidden gem — a subterranean passageway adorned with a stunning mosaic of 4.6 million shells. What makes this place even more fascinating is the mystery surrounding its origins — no one knows who built it or why. You can learn more about its history on its official website or through its Wikipedia page.

Bluebells in Cocknell's Wood

Sun, 05 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Bluebells in Surrey are pretty spectacular, and since I moved in Surrey, nearly 4 years ago, I went to see them every single year. In the past, I used to go to Staffhurst Wood, but that’s a bit too far away. This year, I decided to try a new place, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint! I embarked on a journey to see the famed bluebells of Cocknell’s Wood, and I was absolutely blown away by the sheer scale of the floral display. The moment I stepped into the woods, I was greeted by a breathtaking sea of blue. The sheer number of flowers was staggering creating a photographer’s paradise.

Barcelona

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Photos taken in Barcelona, Spain during a number of trips I took more than ten years ago. Even though I haven’t been there for a while, Barcelona is still one of my favourite cities.

This photo album is part of my attempt to revive my old photo galleries.

Malaga

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Photos taken in Malaga, Spain in December 2010. That was the first time when I visited Malaga and the only time when I was there for holiday. I still remember quite fondly what a wonderful time I had, especially because the weather was hot even for a Spanish winter.

This photo album is part of my attempt to revive my old photo galleries.

Get the petrol prices from ASDA

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year, the UK government encouraged supermarkets to display their fuel prices. The scheme is voluntary, and so far only ASDA has started displaying prices on its website. Since fuel prices vary from place to place, you must visit each supermarket’s website to find the best prices near you. To make this process easier, I wrote the following Python script:

# import the necessary modules
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# specify the stores from which to retrieve the prices. 
# For each store there is tuple ("Name", "URL")
urls = [
        ("Sheerwater", "https://storelocator.asda.com/south-east/woking/forsyth-road-sheerwater"),
        ("Staines", "https://storelocator.asda.com/south-east/staines/chertsey-lane-egham-hythe"),
        ("Fareham", "https://storelocator.asda.com/south-east/fareham/speedfields-park-newgate-lane"),
       ]

# retrieve the prices for each place
for place, page_url in urls:
    page = BeautifulSoup(requests.get(page_url).text, "html.parser")

    postcode = page.find("span", {"class": "c-address-postal-code"})
    petrol_prices = page.find_all("div", {"class": "Service-fuelCategory"})
    print(f"{place} (Postcode: {postcode.text})")
    for petrol_price in petrol_prices:
        divs_petrol_price = petrol_price.find_all("div")
        print(f"\t {divs_petrol_price[0].text} {divs_petrol_price[1].text}")
    print()

Below is the output of the script on 24 Sept 2023:

Tree of thoughts

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today, at our NLP Café, I presented

Shunyu Yao, Dian Yu, Jeffrey Zhao, Izhak Shafran, Thomas L. Griffiths, Yuan Cao, Karthik Narasimhan (2023) Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models. arXiv:2305.10601

Some of the participants asked for the slides, so here they are. I should mention that I prepared the presentation is a hurry, so it contains many chunks copied from the original appear.

While preparing my presentation, I came across this YouTube video which discussed the paper. In contrast to some other presentations which referred only to the examples in the paper, this video shows how you could simulate Tree of thoughts with a single prompt. I am not sure who came with the idea first, but it is also discussed in Hulbert (2023).

How to add abstracts to your bibliography

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How to add abstracts to your bibliography

I am a big fan of the WP Mendeley and I have been using it for quite a long time. I use Mendeley to maintain my bibliography anyway, so having an automatic way to display various sets of publications in WordPress is a bonus. One of the features that I missed is the option to display the abstract of papers. This is not available out of the box, but it’s not too difficult to achieve. Here are the steps that I had to take in order to allow visitors to display the abstracts of my papers.

Basingstoke canal

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Photos taken during a nice stroll along the Basingstoke canal near West Byfleet. I took these photos using my mobile phone on a nice sunny day in December 2020. Given how pretty the place is, I am sure there are more photos to come.

How to create word frequency lists in Python

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I introduced my students to the notion of dictionaries in python. The obvious way of teaching them, especially in the context of my module, is to use dictionaries to create word frequency lists. In order to make the students understand better why dictionaries are useful, we discussed other ways to produce frequency lists which use only lists. This prompted me to try to think as many ways as possible to produce frequency lists. I also wanted to see how feasible is to use these methods.

Word embeddings for aggression identification

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The First Shared task on Aggression Identification was organised in conjunction with the First Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying. The idea of the shared task was fairly simple. Classify a text in one of the following three categories: Overtly Aggressive (OAG), Covertly Aggressive (CAG) and Non-aggressive (NAG). This means that the task is essentially a standard text categorisation task and an approach based on bag-of-words is a good baseline to start with (neither me, nor the task organisers provided a baseline based on bag-of-words, so I don’t know what is the accuracy of the method).

How to add definition lists to WordPress

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I wanted to format the text in a post in WordPress using a definition list-like structure. Basically I wanted something like this:

May 2018 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

What happens if you set the position of an invisible div

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I wanted to allow users of the metadiscourse annotator to quickly locate in text the marker they tag.