Atlantic Ocean
Long-term instabilities of deep learning-based digital twins of the climate system: The cause and a solution
Chattopadhyay, Ashesh, Hassanzadeh, Pedram
Long-term stability is a critical property for deep learning-based data-driven digital twins of the Earth system. Such data-driven digital twins enable sub-seasonal and seasonal predictions of extreme environmental events, probabilistic forecasts, that require a large number of ensemble members, and computationally tractable high-resolution Earth system models where expensive components of the models can be replaced with cheaper data-driven surrogates. Owing to computational cost, physics-based digital twins, though long-term stable, are intractable for real-time decision-making. Data-driven digital twins offer a cheaper alternative to them and can provide real-time predictions. However, such digital twins can only provide short-term forecasts accurately since they become unstable when time-integrated beyond 20 days. Currently, the cause of the instabilities is unknown, and the methods that are used to improve their stability horizons are ad-hoc and lack rigorous theory. In this paper, we reveal that the universal causal mechanism for these instabilities in any turbulent flow is due to \textit{spectral bias} wherein, \textit{any} deep learning architecture is biased to learn only the large-scale dynamics and ignores the small scales completely. We further elucidate how turbulence physics and the absence of convergence in deep learning-based time-integrators amplify this bias leading to unstable error propagation. Finally, using the quasigeostrophic flow and ECMWF Reanalysis data as test cases, we bridge the gap between deep learning theory and fundamental numerical analysis to propose one mitigative solution to such instabilities. We develop long-term stable data-driven digital twins for the climate system and demonstrate accurate short-term forecasts, and hundreds of years of long-term stable time-integration with accurate mean and variability.
Novel Fine-Tuned Attribute Weighted Na\"ive Bayes NLoS Classifier for UWB Positioning
Che, Fuhu, Ahmed, Qasim Zeeshan, Khan, Fahd Ahmed, Khan, Faheem A.
In this paper, we propose a novel Fine-Tuned attribute Weighted Na\"ive Bayes (FT-WNB) classifier to identify the Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) for UltraWide Bandwidth (UWB) signals in an Indoor Positioning System (IPS). The FT-WNB classifier assigns each signal feature a specific weight and fine-tunes its probabilities to address the mismatch between the predicted and actual class. The performance of the FT-WNB classifier is compared with the state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) classifiers such as minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR)- $k$-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Na\"ive Bayes (NB), and Neural Network (NN). It is demonstrated that the proposed classifier outperforms other algorithms by achieving a high NLoS classification accuracy of $99.7\%$ with imbalanced data and $99.8\%$ with balanced data. The experimental results indicate that our proposed FT-WNB classifier significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art ML methods for LoS and NLoS signals in IPS in the considered scenario.
SimpLex: a lexical text simplification architecture
Truică, Ciprian-Octavian, Stan, Andrei-Ionut, Apostol, Elena-Simona
Text simplification (TS) is the process of generating easy-to-understand sentences from a given sentence or piece of text. The aim of TS is to reduce both the lexical (which refers to vocabulary complexity and meaning) and syntactic (which refers to the sentence structure) complexity of a given text or sentence without the loss of meaning or nuance. In this paper, we present \textsc{SimpLex}, a novel simplification architecture for generating simplified English sentences. To generate a simplified sentence, the proposed architecture uses either word embeddings (i.e., Word2Vec) and perplexity, or sentence transformers (i.e., BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT2) and cosine similarity. The solution is incorporated into a user-friendly and simple-to-use software. We evaluate our system using two metrics, i.e., SARI, and Perplexity Decrease. Experimentally, we observe that the transformer models outperform the other models in terms of the SARI score. However, in terms of Perplexity, the Word-Embeddings-based models achieve the biggest decrease. Thus, the main contributions of this paper are: (1) We propose a new Word Embedding and Transformer based algorithm for text simplification; (2) We design \textsc{SimpLex} -- a modular novel text simplification system -- that can provide a baseline for further research; and (3) We perform an in-depth analysis of our solution and compare our results with two state-of-the-art models, i.e., LightLS [19] and NTS-w2v [44]. We also make the code publicly available online.
Compressing multidimensional weather and climate data into neural networks
Huang, Langwen, Hoefler, Torsten
Weather and climate simulations produce petabytes of high-resolution data that are later analyzed by researchers in order to understand climate change or severe weather. We propose a new method of compressing this multidimensional weather and climate data: a coordinate-based neural network is trained to overfit the data, and the resulting parameters are taken as a compact representation of the original grid-based data. While compression ratios range from 300 to more than 3,000, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art compressor SZ3 in terms of weighted RMSE, MAE. It can faithfully preserve important large scale atmosphere structures and does not introduce significant artifacts. When using the resulting neural network as a 790 compressed dataloader to train the WeatherBench forecasting model, its RMSE increases by less than 2%. The three orders of magnitude compression democratizes access to high-resolution climate data and enables numerous new research directions. Numerical weather and climate simulations can produce hundreds of terabytes to several petabytes of data (Kay et al., 2015; Hersbach et al., 2020) and such data are growing even bigger as higher resolution simulations are needed to tackle climate change and associated extreme weather (Schulthess et al., 2019; Schär et al., 2019). In fact, kilometer-scale climate data are expected to be one of, if not the largest, scientific datasets worldwide in the near future.
Dinosaur with scissor-like claws roamed Britain 168 million years ago
Mysterious ancient teeth found in three English counties are believed to belong to a dinosaur with scissor-like claws which roamed Britain 168 million years ago. Paleontologists said the fossils unearthed in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Dorset were the first ever examples of therizinosaur and troodontid dinosaurs on UK soil. Not only that, but the remains are the world's oldest-known evidence of those species and could represent some of the earliest relatives of birds ever discovered. Therizinosaurus – which featured in the most recent Jurassic World film – was a large herbivore dinosaur from the late Cretaceous known for its distinctive long scissor-like claw bones. Along with the troodontid and well-known Velociraptor, it belonged to a group of ancient creatures called the maniraptorans.
Ukraine's Quest for Homegrown AI Drones to Take On Russia
The war in Ukraine, now into its 14th grueling month, has displaced millions, sparked global food shortages, and threatened to spiral into wider conflict. It has also highlighted how new technologies--especially ones drawn from the commercial sector--are upending conventional military doctrine. Ukraine has resisted and repelled Russia's much larger military force, thanks in large part to a willingness, borne of necessity, to adopt and experiment with novel technologies, not all of them originally designed for military use. I recently spoke with Ukraine's 32-year-old minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, about the country's interest in tapping new technology to boost the war effort. Fedorov spoke over Zoom, via an interpreter, from an undisclosed location in Ukraine, about plans to produce more sophisticated drones and other autonomous systems, and to incubate military startups.
'Eyes and ears': Could drones prove decisive in the Ukraine war?
Warning: Some readers may find some of the scenes described in this article disturbing. Kyiv, Ukraine – Ivan Ukraintsev, a stern-faced insurance broker turned director of a wartime charity providing crucial aid to Ukraine's military forces, is on a mission: to help Ukraine win the drone war. He is a polite but no-nonsense character, and he is here to talk about drones. "If we [Ukraine] had enough drones, we could end this war in two months," he says firmly. Ivan, who heads up the charity Starlife, had recently returned from overseeing a drone delivery to Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that has become the focal point for months of bloody battles between Ukrainian and Russian forces. Trench warfare, pockmarked and corpse-ridden swathes of no man's land, and constant artillery bombardments have drawn comparisons to battlefield conditions during World War I.
On the Opportunities and Challenges of Foundation Models for Geospatial Artificial Intelligence
Mai, Gengchen, Huang, Weiming, Sun, Jin, Song, Suhang, Mishra, Deepak, Liu, Ninghao, Gao, Song, Liu, Tianming, Cong, Gao, Hu, Yingjie, Cundy, Chris, Li, Ziyuan, Zhu, Rui, Lao, Ni
Large pre-trained models, also known as foundation models (FMs), are trained in a task-agnostic manner on large-scale data and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks by fine-tuning, few-shot, or even zero-shot learning. Despite their successes in language and vision tasks, we have yet seen an attempt to develop foundation models for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). In this work, we explore the promises and challenges of developing multimodal foundation models for GeoAI. We first investigate the potential of many existing FMs by testing their performances on seven tasks across multiple geospatial subdomains including Geospatial Semantics, Health Geography, Urban Geography, and Remote Sensing. Our results indicate that on several geospatial tasks that only involve text modality such as toponym recognition, location description recognition, and US state-level/county-level dementia time series forecasting, these task-agnostic LLMs can outperform task-specific fully-supervised models in a zero-shot or few-shot learning setting. However, on other geospatial tasks, especially tasks that involve multiple data modalities (e.g., POI-based urban function classification, street view image-based urban noise intensity classification, and remote sensing image scene classification), existing foundation models still underperform task-specific models. Based on these observations, we propose that one of the major challenges of developing a FM for GeoAI is to address the multimodality nature of geospatial tasks. After discussing the distinct challenges of each geospatial data modality, we suggest the possibility of a multimodal foundation model which can reason over various types of geospatial data through geospatial alignments. We conclude this paper by discussing the unique risks and challenges to develop such a model for GeoAI.
Towards Spatio-temporal Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting via Static and Dynamic Learnable Personalized Graph Convolution Network
Li, Xiaohan, Zhang, Gaowei, Huang, Kai, He, Zhaofeng
Sea surface temperature (SST) is uniquely important to the Earth's atmosphere since its dynamics are a major force in shaping local and global climate and profoundly affect our ecosystems. Accurate forecasting of SST brings significant economic and social implications, for example, better preparation for extreme weather such as severe droughts or tropical cyclones months ahead. However, such a task faces unique challenges due to the intrinsic complexity and uncertainty of ocean systems. Recently, deep learning techniques, such as graphical neural networks (GNN), have been applied to address this task. Even though these methods have some success, they frequently have serious drawbacks when it comes to investigating dynamic spatiotemporal dependencies between signals. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel static and dynamic learnable personalized graph convolution network (SD-LPGC). Specifically, two graph learning layers are first constructed to respectively model the stable long-term and short-term evolutionary patterns hidden in the multivariate SST signals. Then, a learnable personalized convolution layer is designed to fuse this information. Our experiments on real SST datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performances of the proposed approach on the forecasting task.
Feed-forward Disturbance Compensation for Station Keeping in Wave-dominated Environments
Walker, Kyle L., Stokes, Adam A., Kiprakis, Aristides, Giorgio-Serchi, Francesco
When deploying robots in shallow ocean waters, wave disturbances can be significant, highly dynamic and pose problems when operating near structures; this is a key limitation of current control strategies, restricting the range of conditions in which subsea vehicles can be deployed. To improve dynamic control and offer a higher level of robustness, this work proposes a Cascaded Proportional-Derivative (C-PD) with Feed-forward (FF) control scheme for disturbance mitigation, exploring the concept of explicitly using disturbance estimations to counteract state perturbations. Results demonstrate that the proposed controller is capable of higher performance in contrast to a standard C-PD controller, with an average reduction of ~48% witnessed across various sea states. Additional analysis also investigated performance when considering coarse estimations featuring inaccuracies; average improvements of ~17% demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy to handle these uncertainties. The proposal in this work shows promise for improved control without a drastic increase in required computing power; if coupled with sufficient sensors, state estimation techniques and prediction algorithms, utilising feed-forward compensating control actions offers a potential solution to improve vehicle control under wave-induced disturbances.