Eventbrite - Jayne Bullock, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford (jayne.bullock@cs.ox.ac.uk) presents Strachey Lecture: Professor Neil Lawrence (University of Cambridge) - Tuesday, 3 May 2022 at Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG, Oxford, England. Find event and ticket information.

When the Russian warship Moskva sank in the Black Sea south of Ukraine, some 500 crew members were reportedly on board. The Russian state held a big ceremony for the surviving sailors and officers who were on the ship. But, considering Russia's history of being not exactly truthful when it comes to events like this, many people wondered whether these were actual sailors from Moskva. Toler is director of research and training for Bellingcat, the group that specializes in open-source and social media investigations. He used facial recognition software to identify the men in the video through images in Russian social media, and found that most of the men were indeed sailors from Sevastopol, the town the ship was operating out of.

The energy transition introduces more volatile energy sources into the power grids. In this context, power transfer between different synchronous areas through High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) links becomes increasingly important. Such links can balance volatile generation by enabling long-distance transport or by leveraging their fast control behavior. Here, we investigate the interaction of power imbalances - represented through the power grid frequency - and power flows on HVDC links between synchronous areas in Europe. We use explainable machine learning to identify key dependencies and disentangle the interaction of critical features. Our results show that market-based HVDC flows introduce deterministic frequency deviations, which however can be mitigated through strict ramping limits. Moreover, varying HVDC operation modes strongly affect the interaction with the grid. In particular, we show that load-frequency control via HVDC links can both have control-like or disturbance-like impacts on frequency stability.

When it comes to clearing the ocean of explosives, the British Royal Navy is turning to robots. Announced April 12, the Ministry of Defense is awarding £32 million (about $42 million) to Dorset-based company Atlas Elektronik to give the fleet an "autonomous mine-hunting capability." Employing robots to hunt and clear the sea of naval mines should make waterways useful for military missions and safe for commercial and civilian use afterwards. "The threat posed by sea mines is constantly evolving," said Simon Bollom, CEO of the UK's Defence Equipment and Support Board, in a statement. To meet this changing threat, the Royal Navy is acquiring a total of nine robotic vehicles, equipped with synthetic aperture sonar and advanced software.

Archaeologists recently discovered a Roman shipwreck in the eastern Mediterranean. The ship and its cargo are both in good condition, despite being 2,000 years old. The wreck, named the Fiskardo after the nearby Roman Empire port of the same name, is the largest shipwreck found in the region to date. The Fiskardo is filled with amphorae -- large terracotta pots that were used in the Roman Empire for transporting goods such as wine, grain, and olive oil. CNN reported, "The survey was carried out by the Oceanus network of the University of Patras, using artificial intelligence image-processing techniques."

We present a system for online, incremental composite event recognition. In streaming environments, the usual case is for data to arrive with a (variable) delay from, and to be revised by, the underlying sources. We propose RTECinc, an incremental version of RTEC, a composite event recognition engine with formal, declarative semantics, that has been shown to scale to several real-world data streams. RTEC deals with delayed arrival and revision of events by computing all queries from scratch. This is often inefficient since it results in redundant computations. Instead, RTECinc deals with delays and revisions in a more efficient way, by updating only the affected queries. We examine RTECinc theoretically, presenting a complexity analysis, and show the conditions in which it outperforms RTEC. Moreover, we compare RTECinc and RTEC experimentally using real-world and synthetic datasets. The results are compatible with our theoretical analysis and show that RTECinc outperforms RTEC in many practical cases.

John Herbst expresses offense at American reluctance to provide MiGs to Ukraine on'Your World.' This is a rush transcript from "Your World," March 18, 2022. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: All right, Vladimir Putin defending his invasion of Ukraine and maybe wincing at all the global notoriety the Ukrainian president is getting, when he never leaves Ukraine, talking to one major legislative body after another of the greatest powers on Earth, as Vladimir Putin tries to explain to a packed crowd in a Moscow stadium that he means no harm, that he is doing good, that he is fighting the good fight, even as that good fight is turning awfully deadly and getting awfully close to a NATO country. In Lviv today, in the western part of the country, a mere 40 miles from the Polish border, the missiles were flying and people were dying. MIKE TOBIN, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Neil, as you mentioned, for the first time, the -- first time in several days, the relative peace of the western part of the country was shattered, as cruise missiles rained down here perilously close to NATO's eastern flank. What they were after was the Lviv state aircraft repair. What that facility does is customize MiG-29s, so they can be used by the Ukrainian air force. Maxim Kozytskyy, the regional administrator of Lviv says the airstrikes were launched from long-range bombers over the Black Sea. Six of the missiles were launched. Four of them got through. Two of them were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses. The Ukrainian air force says one of the reasons the cruisers was way able to get through is because they flew so low. They are the Russian X-55s, with a price tag of about a million apiece. South of here, the town of Mariupol, the situation is quite desperate. You know that theater that was being used as a bomb shelter took a direct hit from a Russian aircraft.

During Russia's war on Ukraine, video footage has circulated on the internet showing the Turkish combat drone Bayraktar TB2 successfully striking the Russian army. But as so often during heightened conflicts, it is hard to distinguish between factual events and misinformation – some videos of the drone attacks have already been exposed as the latter. Given the chaotic events on the ground, it is almost impossible to assess how often and how successfully Ukraine has utilised its Turkish drones so far, Mauro Gilli, senior researcher in military technology and international security at ETH Zurich, told Al Jazeera. "There have been some video footages allegedly showing the employment of the TB2. Of course, information at this point is fragmented, and it needs to be taken with caution. "We do know that Ukraine bought some TB2 over the past years and that Turkey and Ukraine signed an agreement for the production within Ukrainian borders of the TB2 – but, as far as I know, production had not started yet.

The diversity of El Ni\~no events is commonly described by two distinct flavors, the Eastern Pacific (EP) and Central Pacific (CP) types. While the remote impacts, i.e. teleconnections, of EP and CP events have been studied for different regions individually, a global picture of their teleconnection patterns is still lacking. Here, we use Forman-Ricci curvature applied on climate networks constructed from 2-meter air temperature data to distinguish regional links from teleconnections. Our results confirm that teleconnection patterns are strongly influenced by the El Ni\~no type. EP events have primarily tropical teleconnections whereas CP events involve tropical-extratropical connections, particularly in the Pacific. Moreover, the central Pacific region does not have many teleconnections, even during CP events. It is mainly the eastern Pacific that mediates the remote influences for both El Ni\~no types.

In this paper, we propose decentralized and scalable algorithms for Gaussian process (GP) training and prediction in multi-agent systems. To decentralize the implementation of GP training optimization algorithms, we employ the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). A closed-form solution of the decentralized proximal ADMM is provided for the case of GP hyper-parameter training with maximum likelihood estimation. Multiple aggregation techniques for GP prediction are decentralized with the use of iterative and consensus methods. In addition, we propose a covariance-based nearest neighbor selection strategy that enables a subset of agents to perform predictions. The efficacy of the proposed methods is illustrated with numerical experiments on synthetic and real data.