We address the problem of classifying bird species using their song recordings, a challenging task due to environmental noise, overlapping vocalizations, and missing labels. Existing models struggle with low-SNR or multi-species recordings. We hypothesize that birds can be classified by visualizing their pitch pattern, speed, and repetition, collectively called motifs. Deep learning models applied to spectrogram images help, but similar motifs across species cause confusion. To mitigate this, we embed frequency information into spectrograms using primary color additives. This enhances species distinction and improves classification accuracy. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves statistically significant gains over models without colorization and surpasses the BirdCLEF 2024 winner, improving F1 by 7.3%, ROC-AUC by 6.2%, and CMAP by 6.6%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating frequency information via colorization.

Thailand has targeted to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 when the power grid will need to accommodate 50% share of renewable electricity generation capacity; see [Ene21]. The most recent draft of Power Development Plan 2024 (PDP2024) for 2024 - 2037 from [Ene24] proposes to add a new solar generation capacity of approximately 24,400 MWp (more than 4 times the amount issued in the previous Alternative Energy Development Plan 2015-2036 (AEDP2015) at 6,000 MWp, shown in [Dep15, p.9]. This amount does not yet include behind-the-meter, self-generation solar installed capacities of the prosumers, which is expected to increase at an accelerating rate. Solar integration into the power grid with such a sharprising amount will pose technical challenges to the operation and control of the transmission and distribution networks, carried out by the transmission system operator (TSO) and distribution system operator (DSO), as presented in [OB16]. Hence, TSO in Thailand will need an effective means to estimate the solar power generation across the entire transmission network, on an hourly basis, or even finer time resolution, to provide economic hour-to-hour generation dispatch for load following the total net load of the transmission, and to prepare sufficient system flexibility (i.e., ramp-rate capability of the thermal and hydropower plants, or energy storage systems) to cope with the net load fluctuation due to solar generation intermittency for maintaining system frequency stability, concurrently, in its operation. For DSO, a significant amount of reverse power flow when self-generation from solar exceeds self-consumption can lead to technical concerns of voltage regulation and equipment overloading problems. The near real-time estimation of solar generation in each distribution area will enable DSO to activate proper network switching or reconfiguring to mitigate such fundamental concerns to ensure its reliable operation.

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

Historical maps contain detailed geographic information difficult to find elsewhere covering long-periods of time (e.g., 125 years for the historical topographic maps in the US). However, these maps typically exist as scanned images without searchable metadata. Existing approaches making historical maps searchable rely on tedious manual work (including crowd-sourcing) to generate the metadata (e.g., geolocations and keywords). Optical character recognition (OCR) software could alleviate the required manual work, but the recognition results are individual words instead of location phrases (e.g., "Black" and "Mountain" vs. "Black Mountain"). This paper presents an end-to-end approach to address the real-world problem of finding and indexing historical map images. This approach automatically processes historical map images to extract their text content and generates a set of metadata that is linked to large external geospatial knowledge bases. The linked metadata in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format support complex queries for finding and indexing historical maps, such as retrieving all historical maps covering mountain peaks higher than 1,000 meters in California. We have implemented the approach in a system called mapKurator. We have evaluated mapKurator using historical maps from several sources with various map styles, scales, and coverage. Our results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available as modules of the Kartta Labs project at https://github.com/kartta-labs/Project.