Combinatorial problems which have been proven to be NP-hard are faced in Higher Education Institutions and researches have extensively investigated some of the well-known combinatorial problems such as the timetabling and student project allocation problems. However, NP-hard problems faced in Higher Education Institutions are not only confined to these categories of combinatorial problems. The majority of NP-hard problems faced in institutions involve grouping students and/or resources, albeit with each problem having its own unique set of constraints. Thus, it can be argued that techniques to solve NP-hard problems in Higher Education Institutions can be transferred across the different problem categories. As no method is guaranteed to outperform all others in all problems, it is necessary to investigate heuristic techniques for solving lesser-known problems in order to guide stakeholders or software developers to the most appropriate algorithm for each unique class of NP-hard problems faced in Higher Education Institutions. To this end, this study described an optimization problem faced in a real university that involved grouping students for the presentation of semester results. Ordering based heuristics, genetic algorithm and the ant colony optimization algorithm implemented in Python programming language were used to find feasible solutions to this problem, with the ant colony optimization algorithm performing better or equal in 75% of the test instances and the genetic algorithm producing better or equal results in 38% of the test instances.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and unmanned systems are enabling surface and undersea activities even while COVID-19 hampers the ability to put humans on ships, maritime leaders said during a webinar on Sept. 17. Retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the former Oceanographer of the Navy, said COVID has put ship deployments on hold for months, but the agency has leveraged autonomous systems to keep the work going. For instance, NOAA sent Sail Drones to Alaska to perform a critical fishery survey and for coastal mapping. "We were able to map in pretty shallow areas that would have been hazardous for ships," Gallaudet said in the webinar, hosted by the Marine Technology Society's Washington section and the company Oceaneering. NOAA was also able to use underwater gliders to measure water temperatures, which helped accurately predict the track of Hurricane Laura.

Knowledge of the hidden factors that determine particular system dynamics is crucial for both explaining them and pursuing goal-directed, interventional actions. The inference of these factors without supervision given time series data remains an open challenge. Here, we focus on spatio-temporal processes, including wave propagations and weather dynamics, and assume that universal causes (e.g. physics) apply throughout space and time. We apply a novel DIstributed, Spatio-Temporal graph Artificial Neural network Architecture, DISTANA, which learns a generative model in such domains. DISTANA requires fewer parameters, and yields more accurate predictions than temporal convolutional neural networks and other related approaches on a 2D circular wave prediction task. We show that DISTANA, when combined with a retrospective latent state inference principle called active tuning, can reliably derive hidden local causal factors. In a current weather prediction benchmark, DISTANA infers our planet's land-sea mask solely by observing temperature dynamics and uses the self inferred information to improve its own prediction of temperature. We are convinced that the retrospective inference of latent states in generative RNN architectures will play an essential role in future research on causal inference and explainable systems.

A high-tech ship is marking the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower -- the ship that carried a group of European settlers to North America. The famous trip prepared the way for England's colonization of what Europeans in 1620 called the New World. The anniversary was marked this week in Plymouth, England – the starting point for the historic Mayflower crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Local officials gathered with sea travelers and scientists for the launch of the new ship. It is called the Mayflower Autonomous Ship.

New drone video captured the mess Hurricane Sally left behind on Alabama's coastline after tearing through early Wednesday morning with 105 mph winds, torrential rainfall and a powerful storm surge. The storm tore apart buildings, hurled boats and debris around, and dumped as much as 30 inches of rain in southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle before downgrading to a tropical storm Wednesday. It continued to weaken to a post-tropical depression Thursday as it moved northeast. The wall of a residential high-rise building was sheared completely off in the storm, leaving multiple levels exposed, the video shows. Sally tore through bedrooms and furniture, leaving dresser drawers open and bedding unraveled, the video shows.

The objective of this study is to create and test a hybrid deep learning model, FastGRNN-FCN (Fast, Accurate, Stable and Tiny Gated Recurrent Neural Network-Fully Convolutional Network), for urban flood prediction and situation awareness using channel network sensors data. The study used Harris County, Texas as the testbed, and obtained channel sensor data from three historical flood events (e.g., 2016 Tax Day Flood, 2016 Memorial Day flood, and 2017 Hurricane Harvey Flood) for training and validating the hybrid deep learning model. The flood data are divided into a multivariate time series and used as the model input. Each input comprises nine variables, including information of the studied channel sensor and its predecessor and successor sensors in the channel network. Precision-recall curve and F-measure are used to identify the optimal set of model parameters. The optimal model with a weight of 1 and a critical threshold of 0.59 are obtained through one hundred iterations based on examining different weights and thresholds. The test accuracy and F-measure eventually reach 97.8% and 0.792, respectively. The model is then tested in predicting the 2019 Imelda flood in Houston and the results show an excellent match with the empirical flood. The results show that the model enables accurate prediction of the spatial-temporal flood propagation and recession and provides emergency response officials with a predictive flood warning tool for prioritizing the flood response and resource allocation strategies.

In this paper, we introduce the MLM (Multiple Languages and Modalities) dataset - a new resource to train and evaluate multitask systems on samples in multiple modalities and three languages. The generation process and inclusion of semantic data provide a resource that further tests the ability for multitask systems to learn relationships between entities. The dataset is designed for researchers and developers who build applications that perform multiple tasks on data encountered on the web and in digital archives. A second version of MLM provides a geo-representative subset of the data with weighted samples for countries of the European Union. We demonstrate the value of the resource in developing novel applications in the digital humanities with a motivating use case and specify a benchmark set of tasks to retrieve modalities and locate entities in the dataset. Evaluation of baseline multitask and single task systems on the full and geo-representative versions of MLM demonstrate the challenges of generalising on diverse data. In addition to the digital humanities, we expect the resource to contribute to research in multimodal representation learning, location estimation, and scene understanding.

SCI COMMUN### Computer science The United States will establish a dozen centers to study artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS), the White House announced last week. The seven university-based AI centers will receive $20 million each over 5 years from the National Science Foundation or the Department of Agriculture and will use AI—algorithms that can learn to recognize patterns—to tackle problems in areas ranging from farming to particle physics. The five centers on QIS, located at the Department of Energy's national laboratories, will focus on topics such as developing quantum computers that could solve challenges that would overwhelm conventional computers. Each of these centers will receive $125 million over 5 years, as Congress called for in the 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act. ### Archaeology Tiny parasitic worms known as helminths cause malnutrition and developmental disorders in some 1.5 billion people around the world, mostly in developing countries. Scientists now report new evidence that better sanitation can alleviate this scourge. During the Middle Ages and for centuries after, worm infections were as prevalent among Europeans as they are today in people living in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and East Asia, the authors report in a paper published on 27 August in PLOS Neglected Tropical Disease . They based the conclusion on an analysis of 589 samples from skeletons in medieval cemeteries in the Czech Republic, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Because such worms were eradicated in Europe before effective antiparasite drugs were developed, the results reinforce the idea that improvements to water supplies, sanitation, and hygiene can dramatically reduce the disease burden they cause today. ### Disasters When it roared ashore last week in Louisiana, Hurricane Laura packed a double whammy, endangering public safety with its wind and water and slowing efforts to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. Its top wind speed at landfall, 241 kilometers per hour, was the fifth highest documented for any U.S. hurricane. Laura tied a record for the fastest intensifying storm in the Gulf of Mexico, with its wind increasing on 26 August by 105 kilometers per hour in just 24 hours; the causes of such rapid strengthening are little understood. The storm led to at least 19 deaths in Louisiana and Texas. It also threatened to accelerate the spread of COVID-19; testing centers were temporarily closed, and residents of southwest Louisiana, which bore the storm's brunt and had been recording some of the state's highest rates of positive test results, evacuated elsewhere. Seven hurricanes and tropical storms have hit the United States so far this year, one of the most active seasons on record. ### Agriculture The Dutch government last week decided to end mink farming to prevent the animals from becoming sources of the virus that causes COVID-19. More than 40 mink farms in the Netherlands—almost one in three—have had outbreaks of the virus since late April, triggering massive culls. A Dutch law adopted in 2012 banned mink farming by 2024 for ethical reasons, but now the remaining farms must close by March 2021. The government has set aside €182 million to indemnify farmers. Although farms implemented hygiene rules, scientists suspect infected people carried the virus into them. Denmark, Spain, and the United States have seen outbreaks at mink farms as well. ### Public health By testing dormitory wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the University of Arizona may have stamped out a potential outbreak before it could spread. Several countries, U.S. municipalities, and some universities have been checking sewage for RNA from the virus, which can signal infections shortly before clinical cases and deaths are recorded. In Arizona, officials announced last week that wastewater from a student dormitory contained the viral RNA just days after students had moved into their rooms in August; all 311 residents and dorm workers had previously tested negative on a mandatory test for COVID-19. The university retested all of them and found two students who were asymptomatic but positive for the virus; they were then quarantined. ### Diagnostics The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week issued an emergency use authorization to Abbott, a laboratory company, for a 15-minute test for the COVID-19 virus that could help expand the number of Americans regularly tested. The new diagnostic, called BinaxNOW, detects proteins, or antigens, that are unique to the virus with high accuracy and at a cost of only $5 each. Other coronavirus tests that identify genetic material unique to the virus typically cost $100, and laboratories often take days to provide results. The genetic tests and other, antigen-based ones require specialized lab equipment; Abbott's does not, although a health care professional must administer it. The company says it plans to produce 50 million tests in October. Last week, the Trump administration announced it would buy 150 million. The United States currently conducts about 700,000 tests for the virus per day. ### Policy The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) drew criticism last week for revising its guidelines to state that people exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19 “do not necessarily need a test” if they lack symptoms and do not have medical conditions that make them vulnerable. Scientists and public health specialists slammed the 24 August revision, noting that people who do not feel sick can still spread the virus and that the United States continues to lead the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths. Trump administration officials have said too many people have been getting tested out of fear and tests should be reserved for those at highest risk, The New York Times reported. But CDC Director Robert Redfield appeared to muddy the message when he said on 26 August that testing “may be considered for all close contacts of confirmed or probable COVID-19 patients.” ### Infectious diseases The EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit whose highly scored grant to study bat coronaviruses that could jump to humans in China was summarily defunded after President Donald Trump targeted it, has received new funding worth $7.5 million over 5 years, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last week. In April, Trump alleged without evidence that the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology; the EcoHealth Alliance had collaborated with scientists there on the canceled grant. NIH ended it days later, drawing strong protests from scientists. The newly funded work will not revive the earlier project but instead will focus on risks of animal viruses jumping to humans in Southeast Asia, but not China. The EcoHealth Alliance is one of 11 groups NIH plans to fund with $82 million to study such risks. “It's a relief for us to know that NIH isn't going to blackball our organization because of political interference,” EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak says. ### Funding China continued in 2019 its yearslong run of double-digit annual percentage increases in spending on R&D. But it has not yet reached its long-standing goal of increasing R&D expenditures to 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP). Total public and private science and technology expenditures in 2019 rose 12.5% to 2.21 trillion Chinese yuan ($322 billion), the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported last week. Most (83%) went to development, while basic research received 6% and applied research 11%. Relative to other countries, China has been spending more on development and less on basic research. Its total R&D spending in 2019 amounted to 2.23% of GDP, still short of the United States's 2.83%. China was the world's second biggest spender on R&D behind the United States in 2018, the latest year for which a comparison is available, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Analysts expect China to continue to close the gap. ### Astronomy Gravitational wave hunters have netted a big fish: the signal from a pair of black holes merging to produce one with a mass of about 142 Suns. That heft makes it the first confirmed intermediate-mass black hole, with a mass between those produced by collapsing stars and the giant black holes at the hearts of galaxies. Detected in May 2019 by the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory facilities in the United States and the Virgo detector in Italy, the merger is also the most distant seen, at 7 billion light-years away, as well as the most powerful, with the mass of eight Suns converted into energy. The masses of the individual black holes—85 and 66 solar masses—before they merged pose a puzzle, as theorists believe it impossible to make a black hole heavier than 65 Suns from the collapse of a single star. The discovery is reported this week in Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal Letters . ### Nonproliferation After a monthslong impasse, Iran has agreed to allow international inspectors access to two sites that were allegedly part of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. The move preserves, for now, what remains of a multination nuclear deal reached in 2015, from which the Trump administration has withdrawn. The inspections will take place at Abadeh, a testing range for high explosives in central Iran, and at an undisclosed site, which intelligence reports revealed might have contained undeclared nuclear materials and activities. Iran had rebuffed requests from the International Atomic Energy Agency to take samples at the sites; continued stonewalling could have prompted the agency to declare Iran out of compliance with its commitments. The United States maintains that Iran has violated the nuclear deal, and banking and other sanctions lifted after the 2015 accord must automatically resume. But members of the United Nations Security Council last week reiterated their disagreement with that interpretation, and the United States now plans to reimpose those sanctions unilaterally on 20 September. ### Environment The Trump administration on 31 August eased rules on toxic wastewater created by coal-burning power plants, which operators discharge into rivers and streams. The move changes a rule adopted in 2015 by former President Barack Obama's administration requiring plant operators to treat and recycle water used to store coal ash, which contains mercury and arsenic, by 2023. The Trump administration's version instead exempts plants set to close or switch to natural gas by 2028 and allows other plants to delay compliance until that year if they voluntarily adopt advanced biological treatment. The administration says its rule will save the industry money and retain coal-industry jobs while reducing total pollution by 1 million pounds annually, over and above the 1.4 million pound reduction anticipated under the Obama rule. But environmental groups rejected those assertions and predicted that power plants—now the largest contributors of industrial water pollution—will discharge even more. The critics add that the move will prop up coal power, which is responsible for emitting a significant share of global warming gases. ### Conservation A Norwegian wind farm has devised an inexpensive method that may prevent birds from being killed by turbines' rotating blades. By painting only one turbine blade black, the farm reduced bird collisions by more than 70%, say researchers who conducted the first field study of the approach. Fast-moving, monotone blades can be difficult for birds to see; in the United States alone, collisions with wind turbines kill 140,000 to 500,000 birds each year. But a single contrasting black blade makes this rotating obstacle easier for birds to identify and avoid, researchers report in the 27 August issue of Ecology and Evolution . The approach needs further validation, other researchers say. And they note that windmills still rank low on the list of threats to birds: Collisions with power wires and communication towers kill an estimated 32 million birds in the United States annually, for example, and cats are believed to kill 2.4 billion each year. Loss of habitat is another leading threat. ### Infectious diseases Togo is the first African country to have eliminated Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), better known as sleeping sickness, as a public health problem. The World Health Organization (WHO) on 25 August certified the country as free of HAT, which is caused by two subspecies of the Trypanosoma brucei parasite and spread by tsetse flies. Occurring only in sub-Saharan Africa, HAT causes neurological damage and is fatal when left untreated. Surveillance and control programs have helped bring reported cases down sharply, from more than 25,000 in 2000 to 980 last year. WHO hopes the subspecies T. b. gambiense , which occurs in West and Central Africa and is responsible for more than 98% of cases, can be eliminated altogether by 2030. “I am sure [Togo's] efforts will inspire others,” Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. 3.4 million —Square kilometers of sea floor changed by human activities, such as the construction of ports, communication cables, oil rigs, and wind farms, as of 2018, representing an estimated 1.5% of all coastal areas. ### Why it matters The modified area equals that of cities on land, and its marine ecosystems may have sustained damage ( Nature Sustainability ).

Imagine you are considering buying a long-term place with a view of mountains or ocean. For due diligence, your partner asks about flood risk in the area. FEMA maps show the place is outside the 100-year flood zones (1% annual chance). However, you have heard that climate change is making extreme events more extreme and some places have seen multiple 100-year floods within a few years. Next, you browse information about climate change and its impact.

Recent work has shown that deep learning models can be used to classify land-use data from geospatial satellite imagery. We show that when these deep learning models are trained on data from specific continents/seasons, there is a high degree of variability in model performance on out-of-sample continents/seasons. This suggests that just because a model accurately predicts land-use classes in one continent or season does not mean that the model will accurately predict land-use classes in a different continent or season. We then use clustering techniques on satellite imagery from different continents to visualize the differences in landscapes that make geospatial generalization particularly difficult, and summarize our takeaways for future satellite imagery-related applications.