This Ph.D. thesis deals with the optimization of several renewable energy resources development as well as the improvement of facilities management in oceanic engineering and airports, using computational hybrid methods belonging to AI to this end. Energy is essential to our society in order to ensure a good quality of life. This means that predictions over the characteristics on which renewable energies depend are necessary, in order to know the amount of energy that will be obtained at any time. The second topic tackled in this thesis is related to the basic parameters that influence in different marine activities and airports, whose knowledge is necessary to develop a proper facilities management in these environments. Within this work, a study of the state-of-the-art Machine Learning have been performed to solve the problems associated with the topics above-mentioned, and several contributions have been proposed: One of the pillars of this work is focused on the estimation of the most important parameters in the exploitation of renewable resources. The second contribution of this thesis is related to feature selection problems. The proposed methodologies are applied to multiple problems: the prediction of $H_s$, relevant for marine energy applications and marine activities, the estimation of WPREs, undesirable variations in the electric power produced by a wind farm, the prediction of global solar radiation in areas from Spain and Australia, really important in terms of solar energy, and the prediction of low-visibility events at airports. All of these practical issues are developed with the consequent previous data analysis, normally, in terms of meteorological variables.

We formalize the problem of learning interdomain correspondences in the absence of paired data as Bayesian inference in a latent variable model (LVM), where one seeks the underlying hidden representations of entities from one domain as entities from the other domain. First, we introduce implicit latent variable models, where the prior over hidden representations can be specified flexibly as an implicit distribution. Next, we develop a new variational inference (VI) algorithm for this model based on minimization of the symmetric Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between a variational joint and the exact joint distribution. Lastly, we demonstrate that the state-of-the-art cycle-consistent adversarial learning (CYCLEGAN) models can be derived as a special case within our proposed VI framework, thus establishing its connection to approximate Bayesian inference methods.

Multi-sensor data fusion technology plays an important role in real applications. Because of the flexibility and effectiveness in modelling and processing the uncertain information regardless of prior probabilities, Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is widely applied in a variety of fields of information fusion. However, counter-intuitive results may come out when fusing the highly conflicting evidences. In order to deal with this problem, a novel method for multi-sensor data fusion based on a new generalised belief divergence measure of evidences is proposed. Firstly, the reliability weights of evidences are determined by considering the sufficiency and importance of the evidences. After that, on account of the reliability weights of evidences, a new Generalised Belief Jensen-Shannon divergence (GBJS) is designed to measure the discrepancy and conflict degree among multiple evidences, which can be utilised to measure the support degrees of evidences. Afterwards, the support degrees of evidences are used to adjust the bodies of the evidences before using the Dempster's combination rule. Finally, an application in fault diagnosis demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.

In this work we present a new framework to derive upper bounds on the number regions of feed-forward neural nets with ReLU activation functions. We derive all existing such bounds as special cases, however in a different representation in terms of matrices. This provides new insight and allows a more detailed analysis of the corresponding bounds. In particular, we provide a Jordan-like decomposition for the involved matrices and present new tighter results for an asymptotic setting. Moreover, new even stronger bounds may be obtained from our framework.

Conditional density estimation is a general framework for solving various problems in machine learning. Among existing methods, non-parametric and/or kernel-based methods are often difficult to use on large datasets, while methods based on neural networks usually make restrictive parametric assumptions on the probability densities. Here, we propose a novel method for estimating the conditional density based on score matching. In contrast to existing methods, we employ scalable neural networks, but do not make explicit parametric assumptions on densities. The key challenge in applying score matching to neural networks is computation of the first- and second-order derivatives of a model for the log-density. We tackle this challenge by developing a new neural-kernelized approach, which can be applied on large datasets with stochastic gradient descent, while the reproducing kernels allow for easy computation of the derivatives needed in score matching. We show that the neural-kernelized function approximator has universal approximation capability and that our method is consistent in conditional density estimation. We numerically demonstrate that our method is useful in high-dimensional conditional density estimation, and compares favourably with existing methods. Finally, we prove that the proposed method has interesting connections to two probabilistically principled frameworks of representation learning: Nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction and nonlinear independent component analysis.

We present a personalized and reliable prediction model for healthcare, which can provide individually tailored medical services such as diagnosis, disease treatment and prevention. Our proposed framework targets to making reliable predictions from time-series data, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), by modeling two complementary components: i) shared component that captures global trend across diverse patients and ii) patient-specific component that models idiosyncratic variability for each patient. To this end, we propose a composite model of a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) to exploit expressive power of the RNN in estimating global trends from large number of patients, and Gaussian Processes (GP) to probabilistically model individual time-series given relatively small number of time points. We evaluate the strength of our model on diverse and heterogeneous tasks in EHR datasets. The results show that our model significantly outperforms baselines such as RNN, demonstrating clear advantage over existing models when working with noisy medical data.

Clustering using neural networks has recently demon- strated promising performance in machine learning and computer vision applications. However, the performance of current approaches is limited either by unsupervised learn- ing or their dependence on large set of labeled data sam- ples. In this paper, we propose ClusterNet that uses pair- wise semantic constraints from very few labeled data sam- ples (< 5% of total data) and exploits the abundant un- labeled data to drive the clustering approach. We define a new loss function that uses pairwise semantic similarity between objects combined with constrained k-means clus- tering to efficiently utilize both labeled and unlabeled data in the same framework. The proposed network uses con- volution autoencoder to learn a latent representation that groups data into k specified clusters, while also learning the cluster centers simultaneously. We evaluate and com- pare the performance of ClusterNet on several datasets and state of the art deep clustering approaches.

This paper presents the Homeo-Heterostatic Value Gradients (HHVG) algorithm as a formal account on the constructive interplay between boredom and curiosity which gives rise to effective exploration and superior forward model learning. We envisaged actions as instrumental in agent's own epistemic disclosure. This motivated two central algorithmic ingredients: devaluation and devaluation progress, both underpin agent's cognition concerning intrinsically generated rewards. The two serve as an instantiation of homeostatic and heterostatic intrinsic motivation. A key insight from our algorithm is that the two seemingly opposite motivations can be reconciled---without which exploration and information-gathering cannot be effectively carried out. We supported this claim with empirical evidence, showing that boredom-enabled agents consistently outperformed other curious or explorative agent variants in model building benchmarks based on self-assisted experience accumulation.

Apple is going to dramatically change your iPhone. The company announced iOS 12, the new version of its operating software for iPhone and iPads. And while it did not include some of the dramatic features found in previous updates, it did include at least two profound changes. And as well as those, it introduced a raft of fun and meaningful new changes, designed to make the iPhone more fun. They include changes to animoji and new features to improve the phone's augmented reality tools.

Apple has revealed sweeping changes to the Mac platform, amid accusations of ignoring it. Computers from the MacBook Air to the iMac will benefit from new software – named Mojave, after the Californian desert – that will vastly change the look of the computers and allow them to use new kinds of apps in innovative ways. The changes were announced at WWDC, Apple's developer conference during which it updates every one of its platforms. The Mac updates came alongside new versions of its mobile operating system, iOS, and the software that powers its Apple Watch and Apple TV. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.