Atlantic Ocean
Short-Term Forecasting of CO2 Emission Intensity in Power Grids by Machine Learning
Leerbeck, Kenneth, Bacher, Peder, Junker, Rune, Goranović, Goran, Corradi, Olivier, Ebrahimy, Razgar, Tveit, Anna, Madsen, Henrik
A machine learning algorithm is developed to forecast the CO2 emission intensities in electrical power grids in the Danish bidding zone DK2, distinguishing between average and marginal emissions. The analysis was done on data set comprised of a large number (473) of explanatory variables such as power production, demand, import, weather conditions etc. collected from selected neighboring zones. The number was reduced to less than 50 using both LASSO (a penalized linear regression analysis) and a forward feature selection algorithm. Three linear regression models that capture different aspects of the data (non-linearities and coupling of variables etc.) were created and combined into a final model using Softmax weighted average. Cross-validation is performed for debiasing and autoregressive moving average model (ARIMA) implemented to correct the residuals, making the final model the variant with exogenous inputs (ARIMAX). The forecasts with the corresponding uncertainties are given for two time horizons, below and above six hours. Marginal emissions came up independent of any conditions in the DK2 zone, suggesting that the marginal generators are located in the neighbouring zones. The developed methodology can be applied to any bidding zone in the European electricity network without requiring detailed knowledge about the zone.
Prediction of Bayesian Intervals for Tropical Storms
We look at a dataset of tropical storm data in the Atlantic Ocean from 1982 to 2017 and perform deep learning predictions with uncertainty bounds on trajectories of the storms. The result of these storms, particularly the strongest ones called hurricanes--defined as having wind speeds exceeding 74 mph--can be devastating because of their strong winds and heavy precipitation that can cause dangerous tides. Tropical storms can cause major environmental disasters when they reach land, such as the 2005 Hurricane Katrina that resulted in over 850 deaths and caused major economic damage and the 2012 Hurricane Sandy that caused almost $70 billion in damage across much of the eastern United States, with peak winds of 115 mph (Hurricane). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it is likely that global warming will cause hurricanes in the upcoming century to be more intense by 1 to 10% globally (with higher peak winds and lower central pressures), which will result in a higher proportion of more severe storms (NOAA). Historically, hurricane trajectory predictions have used statistical methods that can be limiting because of the nonlinearity and complexity of atmospheric systems. Deep learning techniques and specifically recurrent neural networks have grown in popularity in recent years as a strong method for approaching prediction problems because of the ability to extract important features and relationships from complex high-dimensional data, especially for forecasting and classification (McDermott and Wikle, 2019). We implemented a number of improvements over previous deep learning prediction work (Alemany et al., 2019), including predicting exact storm locations in latitude/longitude instead of a grid value and using a prediction window that uses all previous hurricane data rather than a fixed-size sliding window. While hurricane trajectory predictions have seen improvements recently (SHIPS), we build on previous work to include a fundamental uncertainty measure in the prediction for the first time as part of a neural network framework. The uncertainty measure is especially valuable for understanding a defined location range rather than only a point estimate, which is important for evacuation and safety/preparation purposes.
What Happens When You Mix New Solar Tech And Artificial Intelligence? OilPrice.com
The writing is on the wall. Every major global governmental agency is warning of the imminent tipping point towards catastrophic climate change, even the world's largest oil company Saudi Aramco is now talking about reaching peak oil within the next 20 years, and the International Energy Agency projects that it will happen in more like 10. Solar and wind are cheaper than ever, and large-scale solar mega-projects are quickly becoming the norm. It makes sense, then, that even the supermajor oil companies are diversifying their portfolios and investing in their own demise--also known as the renewable energy sector. Way back in July, 2017 Oilprice reported that France's Total S.A. was "leading the charge on renewables". At the time, Total's website boasted: "For Total, contributing to the development of renewable energies is as much a strategic choice as an industrial responsibility. We are doing our part to diversify the global energy mix by investing in renewables, with a strategic focus on solar energy and bioenergies."
What Happens When You Mix New Solar Tech And Artificial Intelligence?
The writing is on the wall. Every major global governmental agency is warning of the imminent tipping point towards catastrophic climate change, even the world's largest oil company Saudi Aramco is now talking about reaching peak oil within the next 20 years, and the International Energy Agency projects that it will happen in more like 10. Solar and wind are cheaper than ever, and large-scale solar mega-projects are quickly becoming the norm. It makes sense, then, that even the supermajor oil companies are diversifying their portfolios and investing in their own demise--also known as the renewable energy sector. Way back in July, 2017 Oilprice reported that France's Total S.A. was "leading the charge on renewables". At the time, Total's website boasted: "For Total, contributing to the development of renewable energies is as much a strategic choice as an industrial responsibility. We are doing our part to diversify the global energy mix by investing in renewables, with a strategic focus on solar energy and bioenergies."
The STEM-ECR Dataset: Grounding Scientific Entity References in STEM Scholarly Content to Authoritative Encyclopedic and Lexicographic Sources
D'Souza, Jennifer, Hoppe, Anett, Brack, Arthur, Jaradeh, Mohamad Yaser, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph
We introduce the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) Dataset for Scientific Entity Extraction, Classification, and Resolution, version 1.0 (STEM-ECR v1.0). The STEM-ECR v1.0 dataset has been developed to provide a benchmark for the evaluation of scientific entity extraction, classification, and resolution tasks in a domain-independent fashion. It comprises abstracts in 10 STEM disciplines that were found to be the most prolific ones on a major publishing platform. We describe the creation of such a multidisciplinary corpus and highlight the obtained findings in terms of the following features: 1) a generic conceptual formalism for scientific entities in a multidisciplinary scientific context; 2) the feasibility of the domain-independent human annotation of scientific entities under such a generic formalism; 3) a performance benchmark obtainable for automatic extraction of multidisciplinary scientific entities using BERT-based neural models; 4) a delineated 3-step entity resolution procedure for human annotation of the scientific entities via encyclopedic entity linking and lexicographic word sense disambiguation; and 5) human evaluations of Babelfy returned encyclopedic links and lexicographic senses for our entities. Our findings cumulatively indicate that human annotation and automatic learning of multidisciplinary scientific concepts as well as their semantic disambiguation in a wide-ranging setting as STEM is reasonable.
Antarctica's Thwaites glacier at risk of collapse and may lead to sea levels rising by two feet
Antarctica's Thwaites glacier has warm water from three directions well under it threatening to destroy the ice sheet and raise global sea levels by up to two feet. A team of scientists from Oregon State University made the most of ice free waters in West Antarctica to look under the glacier - which is about the size of Great Britain. Warm water from the deep ocean is welling up under the glacier from three different directions and mixing under the ice, the researchers discovered. If it collapses it could take other parts of the ice shelf with it and lead to the single largest driver of sea-level rise this century, lead researcher Erin Pettit told Nature. The £39million study involving UK and US scientists was launched after concerns the increasingly unstable glacier may have already started to collapse.
Europe's migration crisis seen from orbit
In images taken from a satellite floating 400 kilometers above the Earth, Europe's humanitarian crisis shows up as white pixels against the blue-green vastness of the Mediterranean. Captured by the sensors in space, small overcrowded boats with migrants leaving Africa headed north look like tiny white comets bursting through the ocean, leaving a tail where they stir waves. "It's not that with every image I look at, I think about how someone could be dying right now," said Elisabeth Wittmann as she clicked through satellite footage on her laptop showing the coast west of the Libyan port of Sabratha. "That's also to protect myself," she added. The 26-year-old computer scientist from southern Germany is one of a dozen researchers who have teamed up with a new NGO called Space-Eye to develop artificial intelligence technology that allows computers to detect migrant boats in satellite images.
Multiresolution Tensor Learning for Efficient and Interpretable Spatial Analysis
Park, Jung Yeon, Carr, Kenneth Theo, Zheng, Stephan, Yue, Yisong, Yu, Rose
Efficient and interpretable spatial analysis is crucial in many fields such as geology, sports, and climate science. Large-scale spatial data often contains complex higher-order correlations across features and locations. While tensor latent factor models can describe higher-order correlations, they are inherently computationally expensive to train. Furthermore, for spatial analysis, these models should not only be predictive but also be spatially coherent. However, latent factor models are sensitive to initialization and can yield inexplicable results. We develop a novel Multi-resolution Tensor Learning (MRTL) algorithm for efficiently learning interpretable spatial patterns. MRTL initializes the latent factors from an approximate full-rank tensor model for improved interpretability and progressively learns from a coarse resolution to the fine resolution for an enormous computation speedup. We also prove the theoretical convergence and computational complexity of MRTL. When applied to two real-world datasets, MRTL demonstrates 4 ~ 5 times speedup compared to a fixed resolution while yielding accurate and interpretable models.
Boston Dynamics robot dog goes on patrol at Norwegian oil rig
Meet Spot, the first robot to get its own employee number at Norwegian oil producer Aker BP. Developed by Boston Dynamics, the robot is set to start patrolling Aker BP's oil and gas production vessel at the Skarv field in the Norwegian Sea this year, testing its ability to run inspections, detect hydrocarbon leaks, gather data and generate reports. The upshot for Aker BP, which is seeking to be a front-runner in the digitalization of the oil industry, is to make offshore operations safer and more efficient, the company said as it presented the robot at its capital markets day in Oslo on Tuesday. Aker BP will run the tests with Cognite, the software venture controlled by the oil company's main owner, Aker ASA. "These things never get tired, they have a larger ability to adapt and to gather data," Kjetel Digre, Aker BP's senior vice president for operations, said in an interview.
Ocean survey company goes for robot boats at scale
The maritime and scientific communities have set themselves the ambitious target of 2030 to map Earth's entire ocean floor. You can argue about the numbers but it's in the region of 80% of the global seafloor that's either completely unknown or has had no modern measurement applied to it. The international GEBCO 2030 project was set up to close the data gap and has announced a number of initiatives to get it done. What's clear, however, is that much of this work will have to leverage new technologies or at the very least max the existing ones. Which makes the news from Ocean Infinity - that it's creating a fleet of ocean-going robots - all the more interesting. US-based OI is a relatively new exploration and survey company.