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 Belgium


The Download: soccer's data renaissance and China's big nuclear plans

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Autonomous drones may have killed soldiers for the first time. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the logic of surrendering possession seconds into a game. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer. Using AI and data analytics, his team has uncovered hidden tactical patterns and challenged long-held assumptions about how the game should be played.


Decision-focused learning for optimal PV-Battery scheduling

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The use of residential photovoltaics has increased dramatically in recent years. With battery systems becoming more affordable, the optimal operation of a photovoltaic-battery system can bring significant savings to households. Optimal control requires correct forecasts of underlying parameters, such as photovoltaic power generation, to schedule the battery. While forecasting models have become increasingly accurate due to algorithmic advances and data availability, accuracy is typically measured in generic metrics which might not align with the downstream application. This study proposes a decision-focused learning framework that integrates optimization and prediction by training a Long Short-Term Memory photovoltaic energy forecaster on the downstream optimal scheduling of a battery system. The proposed methodology is compared against a standard two-phase approach. Across a 14-month evaluation period, the decision-focused method reduced average electricity costs across twenty buildings by 3.6% when normalized against performance bounds defined by a perfect forecast and a baseline of no optimization. Critically, this financial improvement was achieved despite the model exhibiting a root mean squared error of 19.9%, significantly higher than the decoupled model's 8.2%. Warm-starting the decision-focused model further improves results, lowering average cost by approximately 8%, while also mitigating the negative impact on statistical accuracy (root mean squared error of 13.7%). The findings are statistically significant at the 0.001 level across the twenty households and for each household individually. These results demonstrate that aligning forecast models with optimization goals is key for achieving cost advantages in PV-battery systems. Future research should replicate these findings on other datasets, alternate forecasting models and alternate optimization algorithms.




Medieval cannonballs and WWI bomb discovered under construction site

Popular Science

The weaponry highlights a coastal Belgian city's longtime strategic location. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Renovations on government buildings in the coastal Belgian town of Nieuwpoort are currently on hold after surveyors discovered an impressive archaeological trove: dozens of carefully crafted stone cannonballs dating as far back as the 14th century. However, the medieval ammunition backstock wasn't the only weaponry buried roughly 70 miles west of Brussels.




Revealing Geography-Driven Signals in Zone-Level Claim Frequency Models: An Empirical Study using Environmental and Visual Predictors

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Geographic context is often consider relevant to motor insurance risk, yet public actuarial datasets provide limited location identifiers, constraining how this information can be incorporated and evaluated in claim-frequency models. This study examines how geographic information from alternative data sources can be incorporated into actuarial models for Motor Third Party Liability (MTPL) claim prediction under such constraints. Using the BeMTPL97 dataset, we adopt a zone-level modeling framework and evaluate predictive performance on unseen postcodes. Geographic information is introduced through two channels: environmental indicators from OpenStreetMap and CORINE Land Cover, and orthoimagery released by the Belgian National Geographic Institute for academic use. We evaluate the predictive contribution of coordinates, environmental features, and image embeddings across three baseline models: generalized linear models (GLMs), regularized GLMs, and gradient-boosted trees, while raw imagery is modeled using convolutional neural networks. Our results show that augmenting actuarial variables with constructed geographic information improves accuracy. Across experiments, both linear and tree-based models benefit most from combining coordinates with environmental features extracted at 5 km scale, while smaller neighborhoods also improve baseline specifications. Generally, image embeddings do not improve performance when environmental features are available; however, when such features are absent, pretrained vision-transformer embeddings enhance accuracy and stability for regularized GLMs. Our results show that the predictive value of geographic information in zone-level MTPL frequency models depends less on model complexity than on how geography is represented, and illustrate that geographic context can be incorporated despite limited individual-level spatial information.


This shoe is made entirely from mushroom 'brains'

Popular Science

Science This shoe is made entirely from mushroom'brains' Fungi footwear may offer a solution. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Two types of fungi were used to create the boot. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The fashion industry is ecologically tacky, to put it mildly.


Monkeys walk around a virtual world using only their thoughts

New Scientist

Researchers hope the experiments will pave the way for people with paralysis to explore virtual worlds or more intuitively control electric wheelchairs in this one. Peter Janssen at KU Leuven in Belgium and colleagues implanted three rhesus macaque ( Macaca mulatta) monkeys with BCIs. Crucially, each animal got three implants, each consisting of 96 electrodes, positioned in the primary motor, dorsal and ventral premotor cortex. The first area is commonly used in BCI research and relates to physical movement, but the latter two are thought to be involved in planning movement in a higher, more abstract way. Electrical signals from the implants were then interpreted by an AI model and used to control VR avatars as the monkeys watched a 3D monitor.